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The Digger's Club

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The Digger's Club is Australia's largest gardening club, with over 75,000 members. They were established in 1978 to ensure access to diverse seeds and plants which were disappearing from circulation and became champions of the heirloom fruit and vegetable revival in the 1990s. The club has been a staunch advocate for public control of our seed supply and against its corporatization through GM foods. In 2011, The Blazey family gifted the Diggers Club and it's two historic gardens public gardens - Heronswood and The Garden of St Erth - to the charitable Diggers Foundation to ensure the Diggers legacy will continue to inspire and educate Australian gardeners into the future.

Gardens

Heronswood

Home of the Digger's Club, Heronswood is listed on the Register of the National Estate.[1] It is also listed in Oxford Companion to Gardens as one of only four gardens in Victoria, alongside the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, Mawallock and Rippon Lea.[2]

The first law professor at Melbourne University, William Hearn, employed Edward Latrobe Bateman to design Heronswood's main house in 1866. The house, which is of an asymmetric Gothic Revival design, was completed in 1871.[3]

The Garden of St Erth

In 1854 Matthew Rogers, a Cornish stonemason, left Sydney in pursuit of gold discovered near Mount Blackwood in Victoria. In the 1860s he built a sandstone cottage, naming it "St Erth" after his birthplace in Cornwall now restored and forming the centrepiece of the gardens.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ "Heronswood Estate (listing VIC339)". Australia Heritage Places Inventory. Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. Retrieved 28 July 2016.
  2. ^ Oxford Companion to Gardens, Oxford University Press, 2006.
  3. ^ "Victorian Heritage Register listing for Heronswood House (listing RNE5799)". Australia Heritage Places Inventory. Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. Retrieved 28 July 2016.