Ryan Garratt is Buda’s Garden Curator with over 25 years experience and also a Garden Educator for the Digger’s Club. Join him at 11am  for a winter ramble in our 3 acre heritage garden to learn about its history, significance, what’s happening in the winter garden and future plans.

Stephen Ryan is an horticulturalist, nurseryman, collector, prolific writer and award-winning radio broadcaster and TV presenter and is the newly appointed Patron for the Royal Horticultural Society of Victoria (RHSV). He is also the President of the Mt Macedon Horticultural Society, one of the oldest gardening clubs in Victoria.

Stephen lectures and holds seminars both in Australia as well as overseas. As a plant hunter and traveller he has travelled to many places in the world.

He has published three books on rare plants that have received rave reviews and his manual contains over 2000 plant entries of rare plants available in temperate Australia. He also contributed to the two large tomes produced in Australia Botanica and more recently Flora. Stephen’s garden and nursery Dicksonia Rare Plants hold three national plant collections, Cornus, Sambucus and Acanthus, for the Garden Plants Conservation Association of Australia.

Join Stephen over a delicious hot soup lunch for a talk on Ellis Rowan and the Ellis Rowan project.

(Vegan, vegetarian and non vegetarian)

Ellis Rowan was a world famous Australian artist who explored Australia and remote parts of the world hunting for wildflowers, rare plants, insects and birds to paint. She lived with her family at their Mount Macedon homes – first Derriweit Heights then The Cottage (now Viewfield). She was a prolific artist who from the 1870s to her death in 1922, painted some 3000 pictures. She won countless art prizes, the approval of botanists and the patronage of Queen Victoria and her work was collected internationally. Yet despite all the acclaim she received in her day, today very few people know her name and her legacy has been all but forgotten.