Boyce Gardens, Heritage-listed garden in Mount Lofty, Toowoomba, Australia.
Boyce Gardens is a six-hectare heritage-listed garden and former citrus farm at 6 Range Street, Mount Lofty, on the side of Tick Hill. Margaret Boyce designed the house site, drive and terraces, with topsoil removed, stored and re-spread over the shaped slopes. The grounds hold a remnant rainforest whose canopy now exceeds thirty metres, a sunken white garden, a walled garden, lawned terraces, rockeries and a fruit and vegetable garden.
Leslie and Margaret Boyce began transforming a former dairy farm into gardens after their wedding in 1930. The project grew over several decades from simple beginnings into the complex multi-layered space visible today.
Boyce Gardens takes its name from Leslie and Margaret Boyce, who gardened here from 1930 and had their ashes scattered on the property. Margaret's trials of daffodils, irises, liliums and rhododendrons, recorded in her notebooks, were used by Toowoomba gardeners. Since 1973 the garden has featured in the Toowoomba Chronicle Exhibition Gardens program at Carnival of Flowers time.
Boyce Gardens is at 6 Range Street, Mount Lofty, on the north-eastern edge of Toowoomba. The site covers six hectares of sloping ground, with the house on higher ground looking east over the former scrub. Paths follow shaped terraces and natural slopes, so allow time for walking between the rainforest, walled garden and lawned terraces.
Margaret Boyce started keeping detailed botanical records during the gardens' early years, documenting how numerous plant species grew in the region. These notes form a rare archive showing how the local plant life changed over decades.
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