William James once said "The essence of a genius is to know what to overlook."

Many years ago I designed and supervised the building of a garden [Mawarra] on Mount Dandenong, in which I was allowed to have my head. It is now a veritable arboretum of magnificent trees forming the setting for the stairway that runs down from the terrace below the house, where there is a large water fountain, down to the reflecting pool at the bottom. I was (and am) very proud of that stairway. Chiefly because the treads and risers are so merciful, one just isn't conscious of having walked up some thirty-odd steps.

Certainly, there is no desperate anxiety to get to the top with frequent stops to admire some tree or others, or to look back at the reflections in the pool, or along some sidewalk leading through the trees.

Don't think for a moment this is a garden of specimen trees, it certainly is not! It is a garden of atmosphere, of light and shade, and of subtle splashes of colours, and that brings me to the object of this article. The art of garden maintenance. Most fortunately the garden fell into the ownership of a little lady who is the most superb gardener I have ever met. It is she who introduced the colour into this garden. At first I paled a little at seeing the green ground cover coming out and giving way to plants that were to become the jewels in the garden. I need not have worried. She knew what she was doing alright for now it is not a mass of colour as I feared it might become, but a gently flowered woodland scene instead of the somewhat dreary and too sunless plantation it might easily have become.

As we walked through the garden together (it was hard to believe there is only three acres - there is so much to see), she told me of what had been done under her directions over the years since I had last seen it, and I was thrilled at the way she had brought out the beauty of the design.

Actually in her care and love of the garden she had created so much more beauty than was originally conceived, and I could hardly get over how fortunate the garden had been to fall into such hands. There were some weeds - a few weeds did not trouble her (and certainly not me) unless they were ugly, or were interfering with some plant or other, or taking up ground she required for something else. Nowhere did the garden look fussy or worried, in consequence, forget-me-nots and baby's tears were everywhere, popping up in all sorts of delightful places where they found comfortable lodgement. There was a little clump of daisies growing on top of a stone wall, "Fancy surviving there" I was thinking as I reached for my camera. But of course! Did not that overhanging branch of a tree shade it from the afternoon sun?

This is a happy garden where many of the plants are allowed to do their own thinking, so to speak. There seems to be two kinds of garden owners: those who like plants that seed themselves in unexpected places, and trees that grow in a picturesque manner; and those who don't! But there! How few there are who know "what to overlook".