Room to Grow

As the morning sun begins its slow ascent over the steep hills behind Humula, New South Wales, Kelly Clark is setting up her potting station. The frame is a beaten-up wooden barbecue stand that has had the plate removed, replaced by a black tub that sits within the frame. Kelly tips a fresh bag of potting mix into the tub then stacks pots together in piles of 10. With a bit of a heave, Kelly wheels and drags her potting station over to the rows of mother beds where the 41-year-old grows the plants for her business, Nutshell Nursery.

“I do love living here,” Kelly says as she scoops potting mix into a pot. “No day is the same. There is always a different challenge or a different excitement that comes with living and working on a property.”

Kelly has lived on Umbango, a sheep and cattle property nestled in the valley at Humula, 70 kilometres south-east of Wagga Wagga, for 10 years. Here, she and her husband Matt, 42, are happily giving their three daughters, Pippa, 11, Augusta, nine, and six-year-old Charlie, a childhood very like her own.

Raised on a thoroughbred stud at Ladysmith, just outside Wagga Wagga, Kelly inherited a love of gardening that runs deep within the maternal side of her family. “My great-grandmother Hilda and grandmother Alison were both passionate about gardening,” says Kelly. “My mum, Merryl Pendergast, was always in the garden out at Ladysmith.”

This inherited passion for gardening eventually led Kelly to study landscape architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. After finishing in 2007, she returned to Wagga to study horticulture at TAFE and then landed a position as a landscape designer for local firm Somewhere Landscape Architects. It was during this time at Somewhere that her employer, Alex Dalglish, mentioned a nursery business for sale.

“It was a friend of hers who was selling the business known as Nutshell Nursery,” explains Kelly. “I was three months pregnant at the time with my second daughter, Augusta, and I had the rose-coloured glasses on thinking about how romantic it would be to live and work from home while my children frolicked in the flowers.”

In March 2016, Kelly bought the business. It was a year that started out very dry for most of New South Wales and many farmers, including Matt and Kelly, wondered whether they were about to go into drought. Then, in May, it started raining and 2016 turned into one of the wettest on record.

“It was a crazy year,” reflects Kelly. “When I was prepping the garden beds leading up to moving all the mother stock, it was as dry as a chip. I’ve got photos of the tractor ripping the soil and it’s just dust. Then when we began digging all the plants up and bring them here and that’s when it started raining. It didn’t stop for months.”

With the help of Matt, her mother, Merryl, and Matt’s parents, Lyn and Russell Clark, Kelly managed to uproot and move all 200 mother plants and 5000 pots of stock from Wallendbeen to their new home at Umbango.

Ten years later, Nutshell Nursery is a picture of idyllic country life. The garden is just beginning to wake from its winter slumber. Ornamental pear trees (Pyrus calleryana) and fruit trees such as cherry, nectarine and peach border the designated nursery area. Next to the nursery is Kelly’s vegetable patch, with artichokes ripe for the picking.

Today Beau, the quarter horse gelding, pops his head over the nearby fence to say hello. Kelly digs into the soil and divides tubers of evening primrose (Oenothera fraseri) for potting at her mobile potting station. Her flock of ISA Brown hens and Appleyard ducks cluster at her feet. They know that as soon as she loosens and turns the soil over, earthworms and insects will be ripe for the picking. One of her two Jack Russells, Chilli, plants herself firmly next to Kelly, taking her duties as nursery offsider and chicken overseer very seriously.

Nutshell Nursery has enabled Kelly to combine her skills in landscape architecture with her knowledge of horticulture. In her landscaping work, she has designed and developed gardens in both urban and rural settings, as well as larger gardens for commercial entities, including schools and early learning centres. Many of her designs use the plants she grows in the nursery, where her focus is on growing hardy frost- and heat-tolerant plants.

“I try to grow plants for resilience because, being where we are in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, we can have extremely cold winter mornings down to minus seven degrees, but then hot 40 degree summer days, when the heat just sits in the valley.”

You don’t have to look hard to see how talented Kelly and her green thumbs are. The garden that weaves and winds its way around the Clark family homestead was all designed and planted by Kelly when the couple moved there in 2015. The double-flowered crabapple (Malus ioensis ‘Plena’) flowers abundantly, the stems of the snowball bush viburnum (Viburnum opulus sterile) droop heavily with the striking clusters of white flowers and the rose garden, which Kelly never planned on having, is beginning to bloom in various shades of dreamy pink, purple and white.

“My grandmother Alison was an avid gardener,” says Kelly. “When she moved into a unit at a retirement village in Wagga she asked if she could plant and maintain some roses out the front of her unit. She ended up planting fifty-odd roses! But after she passed away, they were going to pull them out because they were too hard to maintain. So, I uprooted them and moved them here. Now this bed is known as Grandma’s Garden.”

Kelly loves to experiment in her garden; it’s a chance for her to test out new stock lines before growing them in the mother beds to pot and sell through the nursery.

“I like to know what a plant’s characteristics are before I sell them to customers,” Kelly explains. “What it does, what it doesn’t do; what it likes, what it doesn’t like. If something fails, I might try it again and plant it somewhere else; somewhere a bit shadier or somewhere that gets a bit more moisture. I put everything here through a stringent testing period before I start selling it.”

Ask Kelly what a good garden is and she will tell you it is one that is well loved and lived in: a place to spend time. Kelly’s own garden and nursery is a fine example of just that. As she continues to pot stock, hens and ducks scratch and dig around in the mulch in the mother beds. It’s messy, but it’s a happy mess.

“Gardens shouldn’t be stressful. They should be practical,” says Kelly. “I love that I can design a garden for clients and grow the plants needed for my designs. It means that the work I do and the plants I select, I have faith in them. I know that they will thrive in the space that will become their new home.”

Visit Nutshell Nursery’s website or Instagram @nutshellnursery for more information.