Lost & Found
Images_ Simone Gonzalez
Words_ Simone Gonzalez & Barb Somervaille
ONCE A BUSY HOMESCHOOLING MOTHER, BARB SOMERVAILLE IS NOW BLOSSOMING INTO A NEW SEASON ALL OF OF HER OWN - INSPIRED BY THE COTTAGE TREASURES FOUND WITHIN HER ENGLISH STYLE GARDENS.
When Barb Somervaille is out hand weeding on her Southern Qld flower farm, it is not uncommon for her to dig up an odd sock here and there, sprouting out of the red soil in all its dishevelled glory. First impressions deem the culprit innocent enough, but the Somervaille family’s border collie, Peggy also has other antics up her sleeve. “I keep losing gardening gloves!” Barb explains. “Peggy steals my expensive, rose pruning gloves. I’ve given up buying them. Now I just use rigger gloves and wear long sleeves!”
Passionate about embracing an idyllic country lifestyle and all the opportunities it presented, Barb and her husband, Andrew moved from Toowoomba 21 years ago, with their then still growing family, 50kms north to the pocket sized township of Ravensbourne. Here the Somervaille’s have relished in the cool micro climate and nourishing soil at 797 metres above sea level, where echoes of rustic, rambling yet comfortable country living carry throughout their generously sized barn style house and 27 acre property.
Over the years, Barb has been a keen advocate for integrating homeschool life with introducing her children to a variety of interests which have had the potential to develop into fully fledged hobbies. From growing vegies, creating a garden together, music, cooking, woodwork, sewing and art - she believes they have played a vital role in cultivating a strong sense of contentment and an anchor to home. “We didn’t dash backward and forwards to extra curricular activities in town every day. I tried to dovetail music lessons or sport with shopping and appointments in one expedition per week. I called it ‘the mad chook run!’”
Barb’s inextricable connection to home also extends to her love of the old fashioned, fragrant, character filled plants and blooms that fill her English heritage style of gardens. Pervading the immediate landscape of the house, they are distinctly juxtaposed with natives in the surrounding grounds. Barb quips that she believes she may have been born in the wrong country as she speaks of her love of all things English. “The plants seem softer and prettier in here. “Though as I’m learning more about natives, I am discovering there are pretty Australian plants too,” she says. “I love the bush. The colours are more of a muted grey green. But here inside the fence, I prefer my garden to be soft and blousy and that real green-green!”
With her children now mostly grown up, Barb has turned her focus to developing a small scale flower farming business on their property called Country Garden Snippets. As a true champion of the slow movement, she is a firm believer in the ethos of everything in its own time, one day at a time - creating within that framework a more steady strength, resilience and sustainability. Barb is passionate about honouring the principals of the natural world and growing her flowers the way nature intended; slowly and authentically, without sprays, out in the open, in the sunshine and fresh air.
Barb embraces seasonality and enjoys working within environmental limitations - and acknowledging that while she may not have great quantities - it is in this very limitation which she believes gives her blooms a greater value. She also speaks of the joys of an ever rewarding serendipity stemming from unpredictable results when putting seasonal posies or bouquets together. “I never know what I’m going to use until I wander the garden and see what is available. Flowers, foliage, seed heads, buds, branches or even weeds or wildflowers. It is often surprising what goes together at the time.”
With more time nowadays to spend in the garden, after a process of trial and error, Barb has become adept at the art of which mulch to use to keep the moisture in, encourage self seeding and keep the weeds at bay. “If the soil is healthy and the plants are nourished, they should be strong,” Barb explains. “However, if it’s shaping up to be a particularly dry season, I don’t plant as I don’t have water to mollycoddle them except to get the seedlings established. Unless we get more rain for our big dam, I won’t plant annual flowers for summer.”
As an avid plant collector and with a love for flowers and foliage not commonly found at regular markets, Barb is often on the hunt for unusual cottage treasures. Her sights are set on devoting an entirely new area to perennials within the garden which she says will need little fuss and won’t require her to water them beyond the seedling stage, making her flower business more sustainable in terms of time and energy in the long run.
Barb intends to keep her small scale farm manageable and within her capabilities while creatively diversifying the business into various avenues. In addition to selling at the Farmers’ Markets, she has been steadily venturing into the areas of supplying flowers to florists as well as providing and arranging flowers for small weddings. In October, 2020 she also held her first floral artistry and painting workshops on the Ravensbourne property.
Barb’s new workshops are a successful convergence of her three passions; art, flowers and gardening - where the sharing of her water colour, floral artistry and plant knowledge is a culmination of years spent as a homemaker and in the garden. With a long-held love for meeting new people and acquiring new skills, she believes that workshops help promote new learnings which can open up whole new worlds in which to engage in and explore, as well as cultivate a sense of calm and connection to home.
Honouring her homeschooling mindset as a facilitator of the learning rather than as an expert, for Barb her workshops are a celebration of like minded creatives coming together and bouncing ideas off each other in a wellspring of new ideas and directions within a collaborative setting. “I love the word synergy. All that creative energy multiples when we inspire one another,” Barb says. “To give permission to relax and to share the flowers and to introduce them to how fun it is to sketch or paint. To make time to really look at what we can see when we slow down.”
Barb is an ardent believer in life as a continuous journey of learning as she has embarked this year in a Horticulture course at Tafe in order to learn how to raise challenging seeds, the art of propagation and pruning, as well as how to improve the overall health of the soil and garden. “It’s like I’ve done the prac for 30 years and now I’m learning the theory. I’d also like to learn more about the specifics of cultivating plants and nurturing them in their optimum conditions here to show that we can grow cool climate plants with shelter and a bit of TLC but not spoil them with water.”
While the Country Garden Snippets owner acknowledges the often robust nature of some of her plants, like the old fashioned hardy roses which she adores, she also recognises the fragile interconnections of nature, where just as in life itself, can become fractured with sudden and unpredictable change or loss. Showing a remarkable resilience in the aftermath of an immediate family member’s tragic death this year, Barb proves that our journeys sometimes have no choice to be slow - taking each day at a time as we continue to adapt with slow gradual changes in order to regain strength within new unchartered directions.
Barb’s time in the garden has been a vital source of comfort during her great loss - for it is within the presence of nature that she recognises that our pain can be held tenderly, in what can be described as a visceral embrace of colour, touch, scents and beauty designed to nourish and heal. Immersed deep within nature, she is well acquainted with accessing a meaningful connection to a Divine presence - a miraculous oneness.
It is worthwhile to note that there has been no shortage of thriving times within the Somervaille household, with Barb sharing the highlight of their story so far as being able to sell enough flowers to save up and buy tickets to travel to the UK, Italy and France in 2018, in what proved to be a memorable geography excursion as a grande finale to homeschooling with their youngest two children.
Back in her favourite little pocket of the world, Barb has her feet firmly planted on the ground in amongst her favourite cottage treasures and continues to take one step at a time. “I am only a little flower farm,” she explains. “I like it that way. I can manage it myself as I grow the different aspects of my business as I grow in confidence. I have deliberately walked forward slowly to find my feet. I love gardening even more as I spend more time here. Now you have to dig me out to go to town! I love cultivating that sense of belonging here. The sense of place. It becomes part of you. And I’m all for actually sitting in the garden to enjoy it as much as possible.”
For more information on Country Garden Snippets’ future workshops and farm fresh blooms
please contact;
EMAIL; barb.somervaille@gmail.com
WEBSITE: www.countrygardensnippets.com.au
INSTAGRAM: @countrygardensnippets
“Serendipity_ finding something good without looking for it.”