On becoming a ‘tree tragic’

My first engagement with trees was with two natives in our Balwyn street in the 1950s.

A gigantic Bunya pine towered over our front drive and repeatedly dropped those nasty sharp prehistoric-looking branches that we boys found perfect for whacking each other with. At the end of our street, preserved as a roundabout, was a huge river red gum as big as the Separation tree sadly vandalised in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

My mother sent me away to boarding school at age 11, which I loved, particularly spending a year in the bush at Mt Timbertop when I was 14. Walking through the bush seemed remarkably quiet and very dull until we reached the high plain alpine areas amongst the snow gums. But it was at Timbertop that I had my first engagement with gardening when, over one wet winter weekend, I relieved the boredom by creating a rockery.

Married at just 22, Penny and I bought our first house – a terrace in Cecil Street, South Melbourne. We planted our first tree, a lemon-scented gum, which I didn’t then know would overreach our third story in only five years. Our inner-city suburb was so hot in January that we drove to the botanic gardens each weekend just to cool off (it was 5–8°C cooler).

Our lack of backyard space became a real frustration, so every weekend I cycled around the area looking for spacious backyards. After three years I found one owned by The Convent of the Good Shepherd. The block was a huge 60x20 metres with a stable that needed renovating. The first trees we planted were native Casuarina cunninghamii to act as a windbreak and stall the salt winds of Port Phillip Bay.

It was on this new site that The Diggers Club was born in 1978. Having graduated from Melbourne University in Commerce, I urgently needed to build up my gardening expertise, but I only lasted one lecture at Burnley Horticultural College.

To my mind at the time the content was mundane. Every weekend our family would visit the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne to build my knowledge amongst properly labelled mature trees and plants. It’s been my free horticultural college now for over 50 years and our family has visited together well over 300 times.

Australian Tree Seed Company

A year after launching The Diggers Club I received a call from a native tree seed collector; impressed with our marketing in Your Garden magazine, he wondered if we could form a tree seed partnership.

He arrived later with a truckload of native, mostly eucalypt, seed all stored in heavy peanut butter jars. We had just erected steel shelving to hold his stock (in our then very old eight-car garage) just across from our house, which was my office. But with thousands of peanut butter glass jars loaded with tree seed, our second-hand unbraced Brownbuilt steel shelves buckled under the pressure, resulting in an almighty crash that saw all the seed mixing together in a sprawling mess. My new partner screamed, “I knew I shouldn’t have gone into business with you!”

So from day one, The Australian Seed Company partnership that neither of us then wanted was begun…but how would we continue to operate? To succeed financially we needed to win a very big seed order to minimise our losses, and the China Tree Seed Corporation obliged via a tender for one tonne of Cedrus deodar sourced from India. I sent a five-page telex quote, which was successful, largely because the Chinese would never deal directly with an Indian seedsman. So my partner flew to India to meet seed collectors and we could then import the seed to be shipped via Australia, enabling us to escape financial ruin.

Since then, for more than 40 years, Diggers has been growing and listing mail-order seeds and trees for Diggers members. Last year we published our tenth book We Speak for the Trees and we have just completed a national book tour.

Blazey arboretum

Following my father’s death, I inherited a beautiful property in Trawool on the Goulburn River, 90 minutes north of Melbourne. This became the site where we trialled Diggers heirloom vegetable seeds from 1992. On the farm’s river flats, we also trialled growing stone pines, tree lucerne, carob, hazelnuts and paulownias, before establishing The Blazey Arboretum in 2021.

This winter we are planting out our arboretum focusing on very large copses of our most heroic trees such as a giant redwood, ginkgo and swamp cypress. We want to create the sense of awe that everyone feels after visiting a thousand-year-old Gothic cathedral like Notre Dame in Paris. We will also have large plantings of bunya, black booyong, red cedar, gigantic oaks, metasequoia and giant bamboo, to name a few.

Written by Clive Blazey, co-founder of The Diggers Club and The Diggers Foundation.