Garden Entry + Book Pre-order

Details

Garden entry for the open weekend, plus a pre-ordered copy of A Garden Is Not a Painting posted to you free of charge upon publication.

• Garden entry for one person, valid Saturday 17 or Sunday 18 October 2026, 9.30 am – 4 pm  ·  $20
• One copy of the book, pre-ordered  ·  $70
• Free postage when the book is released in March 2027

$90 the pair, 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 one person
• New England Tablelands, northern NSW  ·  20mins south of Tenterfield
• Address: Rural number 707 Bluff River Road, Sandy Flat, Tenterfield. Directions on Google Maps
• The Red Cross volunteers will be making tea and coffee. Feel free to bring your own picnic.

Entry can also be paid at the gate on the day. 

Collecting a plant order? Garden entry is separate and still payable – please add it here or pay at the gate.

About the book. A Garden Is Not a Painting is a philosophical gardening memoir by Carolyn Robinson, who over three decades created two significant gardens on the New England Tablelands – Glenrock, an eight-acre garden built from bare paddock, and later Eagles Bluff, where she began again with the rare advantage of hindsight. Working across southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, she has spent a lifetime observing what a garden actually asks of the person who makes it.

The book takes its title from the realisation at its centre: a garden is not a painting to hang on a wall. It is alive, full of life and ever-changing – lived with, dynamic, adapted and reshaped over time. This is a book full of practical wisdom, but it is not only a how-to guide. It is a book about the ethos beneath the decisions: how to read a place before planting it, how to garden for drought without surrendering beauty, why the gardens that move us are almost always the ones shaped by a single pair of hands.