2 Garden Entries + 1 Book Pre-order

Details

Garden entry for two people for the open weekend, plus one pre-ordered copy of Carolyn Robinson's book A Garden Is Not a Painting posted to you free of charge upon publication. Just show your order confirmation email at the garden gate for entry.

• Garden entry for two people, valid Saturday 17 or Sunday 18 October 2026, 9.30 am – 4 pm · $40
• One copy of the book, pre-ordered · $70
• Free postage when the book is released in March 2027

$110 all up, with postage included. Please make sure the postal address you give at checkout is where you’d like the book sent.

Open Garden Day

Entry to Carolyn Robinson’s garden for the spring open weekend. Just show your order confirmation email at the gate.

• Valid on either day – Saturday 17 or Sunday 18 October 2026
• Open 9.30am to 4pm both days
• Admits two people
• New England Tablelands, northern NSW · 20mins south of Tenterfield
• Address: Rural number 707 Bluff River Road, Sandy Flat, Tenterfield. Directions on Google Maps
• Tea, coffee and light lunches provided by Red Cross volunteers. Cash only.
• Free entry for children under 16
• Plantsman David Johnstone will be selling plants on the day, including the ornamental grasses that Carolyn adores
• Forty-one varieties of Carolyn's favourite plants are also for sale as tubestock, grown for this weekend by Sarah Caldwell of Mole Station Native Nursery. Pre-order online only by 20 September to pick up at the open garden weekend.

A note on the drive. Bluff River Road is a well-graded country dirt road, and it's 7km from the turnoff to the garden. Along the way there are several places where traffic needs to give way — at property grids and at two river causeways. Ordinary cars and small buses are fine, but the road is not suitable for buses carrying more than 30 people. Please drive with care, caution and courtesy.

About the book

A garden of a lifetime takes, well, a lifetime. Carolyn Robinson has made two.

Glenrock came first – eight bare acres on the New England Tablelands that became one of the country's most admired traditional gardens. Then at 55 Carolyn began again, from nothing, on a granite rise above the Bluff River south of Tenterfield. Eagles Bluff is the rarest thing in a gardening life: a chance to do it all again, with hindsight.

It is from here that she looks back – on the two gardens she made for herself, and the many she has made for others across northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. What she offers is not only what to plant, but how to think about planting it: how to read a place before you touch it, how to garden through drought without surrendering beauty, why the gardens that move us are almost always shaped by a single pair of hands.

The title is not an argument against beauty. A Garden in not a Painting is something Carolyn came to see slowly, over decades in the garden. Buy a painting and you own it – it hangs on the wall. You might change; it doesn't. But plant a garden and you enter into something with it. "A garden is never really finished," she writes. "It grows, shifts and deepens with the seasons, and with you." That, she found, is where the pleasure is.

In the tradition of Beth Chatto, it is written for the thoughtful reader who gardens, and for anyone making a garden for the first time.