Carolyn Robinson is a gardener and garden designer based on the New England Tablelands. Over three decades she has created two significant gardens — Glenrock and Eagles Bluff — and worked with clients across southern Queensland and northern New South Wales.
Carolyn’s approach was shaped early by Beth Chatto’s principle of choosing plants that suit their environment — ‘right plant, right place’ — and refined by decades of drought, flood and the subtle seasonal shifts that test a gardener’s craft.
A Garden Is Not a Painting is Carolyn’s first book. It takes its title from the realisation that ‘a garden is not a painting to hang on a wall. It is alive, full of life and ever-changing — lived with, dynamic, adapted and reshaped over time.’ Carolyn describes how to read a place before planting it, how to garden for drought without surrendering beauty, and why the gardens that move us are almost always the ones shaped by a single pair of hands.
