Susan Irvine is an educator, gardener, and writer whose books and articles are widely read. Most of all, she is well known as a rosarian and became a leading authority on roses in Australia for about two decades between the 1990s and 2000s. She has written about roses and their cultivation for many gardening publications including The Age, Australian Gardens Journal and was a regular columnist for Your Garden. She authored seven books about gardening with roses. She freely gave her time in giving lectures and demonstrations about roses. She was also widely respected for her work in tracing, identifying, and preserving lost and forgotten roses in Eastern Australia.
Susan St Leon headmistress 1973-1982 (photo: Lauriston Girls’ School in Melbourne)
Born in Dalby, Queensland, in 1928, Susan Moore (nee Irvine) was the second of three daughters of John Moore and Niree Hunter who lived at Lynnfield. Her mother ran a business full time called “Arts and Antiques”. Until she was seventeen years old, Susan was sent to a boarding school just streets away from her home, which was the tradition during that time. It was said that she hated her boarding school. At the University of Melbourne, she followed a voice and music degree in the mid-1940s, which she couldn’t complete. At the age of nineteen, she married Dr. Peter Tod, a radiologist, ten years her senior. They moved to London in 1949 for her husband’s further training. Fluent in German, she earned her degree in medieval German mysticism, German poetry, and philosophy. Her PhD at the University of Heidelberg was cut short and she returned to Australia in 1956 due to a failed marriage and the sickness of her daughter, Felicity. After returning to Australia, Susan started her career teaching English and German in private schools. She became the headmistress at Abbotsleigh in Sydney between 1965 and 1972, and Lauriston Girls’ School in Melbourne from 1973 to 1983. She remarried and was known as Susan St Leon during that time. She also gave birth to a second daughter, Josephine.
In 1982, after retiring from her long teaching career, she became passionate about old-fashioned and species roses. She bought a century-old stone cottage, Bleak House, at Malmsbury on the windswept plains of Central Victoria, which was built in the 1850s. She established a garden which became a well-known rose nursery on fifteen acres (6.1 ha). In 1985, she married W.R.M. (Bill) Irvine, who was the chairman of the National Australia Bank between 1979 and 1997.
Susan published her first book in 1992, titled A Garden of a Thousand Roses: making a rose garden in Australia. It was based on her experience with establishing the garden around Bleak House, and her discoveries of finding Clark’s roses. The one thousand roses in the Bleak House garden gave her the title for her first gardening book. It is also the story of making the garden – thick with challenges, hardships, disappointments, glimmers of hope, success, and satisfaction.
Her second book, A Hillside of Roses was about the making of her second garden at Erinvale, with about 0.61 ha in extent and a house built in 1870, on a steep slope in Gisborne, Central Victoria. Published in 1994, it was regarded as a very interesting rose book that read like a novel. It is a continuation of a love affair which she began in her former property; Bleak House. At Gisborne, she held the Alister Clark Rose Collection which was one of the first collections established and registered with the then newly formed Ornamental Plant Collection in Australia. Based on her experience of growing roses, in 1996 she published another book titled Fragrant Roses.
While holidaying in Elizabeth Town in Northern Tasmania in 1996, Susan and Bill spotted a sandstone Georgian House with a blue roof. A year later she purchased and moved to “Forest Hall”. Once again, she established a large rose garden there. Irvine planted about 800 roses in Forest Hall. Most of them were species roses. In 1997, she published two interesting books about roses, titled Susan Irvine’s Rose Gardens and Rose Gardens of Australia. In 2003, based on her gardening experience at Forest Hall, she published The Garden at Forest Hall. As Susan grew older, she planted more trees. At one stage, she planted forty-seven crab-apple trees in her garden. In 2007, she published her last book Rosehips & Crab-apples. When their health failed, the Irvines moved to a much smaller property at Evandale, Tasmania in 2013. Illness forced them to sell that too at the end of 2014. Susan’s husband, Bill, died in 2017.
It was Susan’s mission to preserve both species roses and Alister Clarke’s roses. Susan viewed as hardy those roses that could sustain themselves during the long dry spell in Australia. The roses she planted in her gardens could engulf buildings or could be ones that created a dense hedge that didn’t require lots of maintenance. She carefully selected her roses to provide flowers in spring and summer as well as colourful hips during autumn and winter.
Susan described roses at her garden at Forest Hall as mostly hybrids of the rampant R. gigantea, that occupied a great deal of space. She mentioned many of Alister Clark’s roses such as Mrs. Richard Turnbull, Golden Vision, and pale pink Jessie Clark enchanted the visitors to the garden. She used low-growing, recurrent and fragrant roses bred by Alister Clark such as Borderer, Suitor, Marjory Palmer and Jersey Beauty in her formal rose garden. In her books, Susan talked about her roses lovingly, as if they were people residing in her garden, for whom she tolerated most of their eccentricities. Readers feel them come to life.
When she began planting an extensive rose garden at Bleak House, Susan became interested in Alister Clark’s roses. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was credited in finding, saving, identifying and reviving most of his roses. Susan and Coldstream nurseryman, John Nieuwesteeg, jointly surveyed possible Clark roses in gardens at Berwick, Kyneton, and Glenara at Bulla, which was Alister’s house and rose nursery.
Nancy Hayward (1937) – Photo credit: South Pacific Roses
Susan’s research and writings about Clark’s roses greatly influenced their revival and inclusion in the catalogues of online and retail rose nurseries of Australia and New Zealand. Little-known roses like Restless were carefully reintroduced. Clark’s rose Nancy Hayward for instance, was identified by Nancy Hayward herself. Nancy Hayward was Bill Irvine’s aunt. According to a newspaper article, Susan invited Nancy to lunch. She arranged a bouquet of Nancy Hayward roses on the lunch table to impress her guest. She recalled the stern old lady was not happy. On sitting down to lunch, Nancy Hayward exclaimed she couldn’t stand that rose because she hated its colour, lack of perfume and other irredeemable features. Nancy Hayward was furious Alister had named it after her. However, Nancy Hayward rose remained the favourite rose of Susan Irvine.
By 1992 Susan had named a hybrid rugosa after her mother; Niree Hunter, that she had discovered at Bleak House garden. Rugosa Bleak House, which was found at Bleak House, was named in 1995 in honour of Susan’s previous magnificent rose garden. Susan Irvine, a Hybrid Gigantea rose bred by George Thomson, was named after her and introduced in South Australia in 1996. In 1994, she was awarded the Australian Rose Award by National Rose Society of Australia. Susan became a Life Member of Heritage Roses in Australia in 2001.
References
Helen (2010). Wonderful thorns, great hips and baby elephants all in a row, in Gardening with Helen. Accessed from, https://gardeningwithhelen.wordpress.com/tag/susan-irvine/
Irvine, S. (2007). Alister Clark roses at Forest Hall, in Heritage Roses in Australia. Accessed from https://www.heritageroses.org.au/australian-roses
National Rose Society of Australia (1994). Australian Rose Award – 1994. Accessed from http://www.rose.org.au/assets/1994-mrs-susan-irvine.pdf
O’Brien, D. (1994). A novel way with words and roses, in The Canberra Time on Sunday 13th November 1994, p. 26. Accessed from https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/130537353
Stackhouse, J. (2011). Rose garden: Thinking of planting roses? Explore Sarah Irvine’s rose garden, in Homes to Love. Accessed from https://www.homestolove.com.au/rose-garden-9838
Wikipedia (n.d.). Susan Irvine. Accessed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Irvine 0 HTML Sample
From the Notebook of a Rosarian... 