Plot: Designing Your Garden

Meredith Kirton Meredith Kirton professes a lifelong commitment to gardening and horticulture: 'My mother introduced me to the garden. Every weekend she'd take me and my two sisters to nurseries and we'd ride around in the trolleys while she browsed. One year Mum took us to a specialist camellia nursery and we each chose a camellia to plant in the garden. Mine was "Debutante", a fluffy, girly pink double. And every year she'd plant yellow polyanthus under our bedroom window. Meredith always knew she wanted to work in the industry, either as a botanist or a horticulturist. A week at an analytical laboratory washing test tubes for work experience in high school decided her against botany, but a stint at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney 'was just fantastic'. For 10 years Meredith worked in a nursery while studying at school and college. In 1991 she completed an Associate Diploma of Applied Science inUrban Horticulture, at Ryde School of Horticulture and afterwards audited various subjects from the Associate Diploma of Landscape course at the same institution. Since 1997 Meredith has written for some of Australia's most successful gardening and lifestyle magazines - Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Gardening Australia, Australian Horticulture, For Me, Home Beautiful, Inside Out and The Australian Gardener. She has also worked on two top-rating television programs, as designer and contract buyer for Groundforce (Network Seven) and as horticultural researcher for Burke's Backyard (CTC Productions, Channel 9). She has also appeared as both co-host and guest horticulturist on radio 2GB. As a freelance landscape designer Meredith has designed domestic and commercial gardens. For her own turn of the century farmhouse in Sydney she has designed and planted a wildflower and grass meadow in the front garden and a formal garden room at the back, where elegant evergreen shrubs and pleached coffee trees are features. Meredith has also taught at Sydney Community College, the Ryde School of Horticulture and the Ross School of Gardening. Meredith is currently a freelance landscape designer and gardening writer and researcher. She is the gardening editor for the Sun Herald, where she has been writing weekly for two years, she writes for Real Living magazine which is launched in September 2005, and she also writes various garden articles for House and Garden. Meredith is also the horticultural consultant at Home Beautiful. Merediths much awaited book Plot comes after her highly acclaimed and best-selling modern Australian gardening book Dig (Murdoch 2004). Meredith spends much of her time developing a foliage farm on the mid-north NSW coast, specialising in rare and colourful shrubs for cut leaves, stems and fruit. She also grows fruit trees, herbs and vegetables organically for her own family. Mother of two young children, she shares a love of gardening with her husband Michael.