Larundel, started in the 1850s by AA Austin, son of Thomas and an MLC and philanthropist in his own right, was born of a family dispute. The original estate was much larger than its current 2,500 acres (950 ha); time and the establishment of a soldier-settler scheme after WWII reduced the greater part of the original holding.

In the 1980s the-then owners engaged the garden designer Paul Bangay to lay out formal gardens on a European plan. Over time and changes of ownership the 11 acres of formal garden, including almost four acres of lawns, had been neglected, becoming overgrown and unwieldy.

Enter Ben Waight. The young Ballarat horticulturist received a phone call one day asking if he would consider reinstating the original layout at Larundel.

"I jumped on it," Ben Waight says.

Waight was working on the adjoining Narmbool gardens, a project he says he was putting his heart and soul into, but the sight of Larundel drove him into making a change. He says the gardens are a kind of 'double-blind': they are a 1987 copy of the kind of gardens colonial Australians were building in the 19^th Century to remind them of their homes in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of what they had seen travelling in Europe: the great gardens of Italy and France especially.

They were expensive to build and maintain then, and they are still. Gardens require water and attention; the more elaborate, the greater the need.

"These kind of gardens were a luxury," Waight says.

"Not everyone could afford to have a garden. It ties into the heritage of the people who came over here; with people trying to recapture why they came to Australia. They get here, realise it's such a harsh climate, they want to be reminisce, have a piece of home with them.

"What encapsulates and drives these gardens is people wanting to relive their European history. But yes, being started in 1987, these gardens are a bit of a cheat."

The Austin brothers were not shy on rivalry, and competed in building bigger and better gardens on their respective runs. At Larundel, the head gardener was a man named McPherson. A 1912 photograph depicts him bearded, bowler-hatted, wearing a waistcoat and striped shirt among a fecund garden of blooms and fruit flowers, fork in hand and wooden wheelbarrow full of cuttings.

At that time Larundel's garden was more like a grand cottage garden, and of course aside from the visual pleasure it provided, it also was a working food supply for the property. Photographs of the Austin family over the decades invariably feature them sitting outside among what must have been a much-loved aspect of farm life.

By the time of Bangay's engagement, later owners had spent a lot of time in Europe. There is a strong continental influence in the formal lawns and tree-lined courtyards, in the box hedges and espaliered poplars which speak to the ideas of Versailles and other grandiose gardens, in forming vistas and views.

"It's very equally spaced," Waight says.

"But a garden like this requires work and understanding, and in changes of hands and owners it became overrun.

"These poplar yunnanensis had grown wild and I had to bring them back into shape; the hedges had to be trimmed slowly. It's very tempting, when you see something overgrown and wild, to just attack it and cut it back, but doing that can really damage or kill the plants. You have to do this slowly and think about it, about shapes and where you want to finish."

In Larundel's case, the restoration has taken almost four years now, and Waight says it would be easy to keep going.

"For me as a gardener, it's been challenging to garden like this," he says

"It's not something you really get taught in Australia in horticulture; it's something you have to learn off your own bat. I really like to work with nature, and this garden tends to control it a little bit. We've got pleaching* and everything's espaliered and hedged and very manicured. But that's the nature of the design. And again, a reflection back to the time in Europe and the willingness of people to show off their wealth."

Restoring a garden is partially a detective story, and archeological dig, and a lot of accommodating the desired and the practicable outcomes - all within a budget.

"You find the bones of the garden and try to be sympathetic to the original design and incorporate your own thoughts and, and work with the client and what they want to achieve," says Waight.

"You have to tick the boxes of what the client brief is, but also pay tribute to the history."

Doing just that is increasingly difficult. The plants and trees chosen for gardens and parks 100 or 120 years ago are now respondingly differently as our climate changes. Some are doing better than in the past, while others cannot survive.

Ben Waight says to do a restoration successfully requires a great amount of research now. Plants which grow quickly and give a pleasing result in a short time are often susceptible to disease, while slow growers are less likely to succumb.

"In the designs that I do, I try to work within the Fibonacci** design concept, using that natural way of flowing. As an observation, I find female gardeners really have a more natural way of going about gardening than males.

"I'm not sure what psychological element this comes from, but the male visitors to this garden and all the gardens I've worked in and designed with, the first thing they want to know about is the lawn and how I get my lawn so green and how often I mow them and my fertilising regimen.

"Whereas the female visitors to the garden will often just meander and find their own way around and are impressed, not by lines and definition, but really by the cascading of it."

Ben Waight's passion for horticulture and garden design was born early. His mother's desire to grow boronias, and her unfortunate lack of success, spurred his curiosity as to why some things grew and some didn't.

"Yeah, I suppose I wanted to help my mum, although we never managed to grow boronias and to this day I still struggle, but it did spark my passion early in the piece," Waight says.

"My grandfather was a gardener, my Nan is a gardener, so it's in my blood; and it led me to training in horticulture in Ballarat."

*Pleaching is the garden practice of interweaving tree and shrub limbs to form fences and

**Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician who derived a sequence of numbers which can be observed in nature as a series of cascading or flowing spirals and variations, and creates a ratio which pleases the eye. His permutation is often used in gardening.