Community & Business
23 September, 2025
Awards gardening glory
IT takes a particular kind of love, curiosity, and dedication to transform a couple of dry, treeless paddocks into lush, thoughtful, and astounding gardens that meander over acres.
With pockets of colour, featured garden nooks, overflowing vegetable and herb patches, shaded tropical rooms, and a huge corridor of trees that have created an ecosystem for so many birds, native plants and forest animals, Kathryn and John Edwards have created a wonderland filled with memories.
Now, after 47 years, they have a property in Myola that welcomes. It is where their son chose to get married, where friends drop in to pick up homegrown vegetables and fruits or plants, and where the inaugural 2025 Mareeba & District Lions Garden Awards found this year’s Best Rural and Residential Garden, and overall competition Champion Garden.
It was an especially sweet accolade for the couple, well known in the gardening community in the shire.
The garden competition had been running for 56 years, first support by the council, then handed over to the Mareeba Rodeo. The Edwards’ had won awards a couple of times.
However, in 2024, the Rodeo Association cancelled the event due to lack of entries, then this year shut down the competition altogether.
Gardeners, including Kathryn and John, were devastated by the news.
“That’s when [local gardeners] began lobbying for the competition to continue,” Kathryn said.
“So it was just lovely that the Lions Club picked it up.”
She had been impressed at the Awards Afternoon Tea, held on Saturday 13 September, by the number of sponsors, and their genuine support for both the event, and its importance in the community.
“Gardening in itself... is fairly solitary and you could spend your whole life and never meet another gardener. So this competition is important.
“There was easily 80 or more people... and the Lions club, oh, they were so good, it was a perfectly organised event.”
She hopes the event grows and people understand their homes are not open to the public but judged privately.
Looking around the property, aptly named after their love of rain trees, there is an organised, yet seemingly whimsical, feel to the place. You can walk past the tea pot garden, where, subtly hanging amongst the foliage are old, iron or tin tea pots of varying shapes and styles. In another shade-clothed section, you walk along a path through an extraordinary Anthurium garden. The giant leaves have a distinct Jurassic Park feel.
And everywhere has a story, even down to the remarkable borders of variegated mondo grass (which they have cultivated and painstakingly divided over years).
One would never know these knowledgeable (encyclopaedic) gardeners hadn’t had a clue when they started.
After backpacking from Sydney to the north in the late 1970s, the couple bought the property and set up an Arabian horse stud. The land was bare paddocks, not a plant in sight.
“You could see everybody and everything,” John said.
The first thing they decided to do was plant trees and create some structure for gardens
“I’m not kidding you, we went looking, and every nursery said, ‘what do you want to buy a tree for? Trees fall down you don’t plant them’.
“And we were going, ‘but it’s the tropics and it’s really hot. We need some shade’.”
Eventually they found a nursery which sold them five rain trees (which they had fallen in love with after a visit to Mossman.
“We were on about $120 a week, we bought them at $17 each. And the horses promptly ate one to the ground,” John said wryly.
First lesson. How to propagate the seeds.
“Everyone has got one of our rain trees,” Kathryn said with a satisfied smile.
“We grew them and gave them to every neighbour. Way back then, I thought, this street needs trees. Now look. It’s good, isn’t it?”
While the rain tree is not native, it flowers and attracts birds to the honey and bugs to seeds.
“It’s a legume, so it puts nitrogen back in the soil. And the fine leaves don’t bank up, it’s the perfect tree.” John said.
They also planted about 1600 trees along the creek that bordered theirs, and neighbours’ properties, to stop erosion along the waterway.
But not everything always went to plan, they admitted with retrospective humour.
“This is probably about garden number five, because we stuffed it up,” Kathryn said.
“Remember when palm trees were the fashion? The whole place was palm trees. What a bad mistake, so they all just came out.
“And then we thought, ‘oh bromeliads’, and away we went – big mistake. So they came out. We kept a few good ones – we learned.”
Or did they? Bougainvillea anyone?
“Our driveway was straight in and straight down to the back of the property,” John said. “It was fully lined, all the way, with bougainvillea. It was an arch you drove through.”
But what had looked spectacular was a prickly business, and thorns on the ground continually punctured the mower tyres. Out they came, which was painstaking. Literally.
Was this now garden mark V?
“Mark 30,” John quipped. “Or mark whatever. It will change tomorrow. That’s what gardening is. It’s an activity. You have to really enjoy it, otherwise it’s a really horrible job,” they both laughed.
“The wonderful thing about here is, if you were in Sydney or Melbourne, you couldn’t plant four or five gardens in a lifetime,” Kathryn said.
She nods to a full-flowered garden which is only four years young, but looks like an old Japanese painting.
“It’s this climate. If you stuff it up you can rip it out and start again.”
These days, any plant removal is more pragmatic.
“We’re in our 70s, so I suppose our garden can’t get any bigger,” she said. “We are planning our old age, and we want to stay here, we want to be able to manage it.”
Thus, it has become a very popular source of plants for their circle of gardening friends.
“The amount of plants that go out from this place is unbelievable. It works beautifully.”
John added: “We’re trying to encourage people to enter the garden competition. That’s our aim.
“That was the lovely thing about this year’s competition, about 50 per cent of people were new. Which is wonderful.”
2025 Mareeba & District Lions Garden Awards
Australian Native Garden:
1st: Amanda and Andrew McCulloch
2nd: Sandra Paton
Patio Living Area:
1st: Jacqueline Boneham
2nd: Maria Savaglio
Residential Garden:
1st: Maria Savaglio.
2nd: Rita Compton
Edible Garden:
1st: Peter and Heather Brown
2nd: Clare Blackman
Commercial Garden:
1st: Mareeba Heritage Centre
2nd: Mt Molloy Café
Rural Residential Garden:
1st: Kathryn and John Edwards
2nd: Amanda and Andrew McCulloch
School Garden:
1st: Biboohra State School
2nd: Mt Molloy State School
Encouragement Award:
Peter Harben
TCB Landscape Joy Paterson Champion Garden:
Kathryn and John Edwards
Sponsors:
Cairns Hardware • Tablelands to Tabletops • Amaroo Estate • Guilfoyle Funeral Services • Flourish Plants • TCB Landscape • Mareeba Shire Council • Mareeba Chamber of Commerce
Judges were Elaine Duncan and Joy Paterson.
