the farm

Stone architecture

Built from the site, Lavandula's stone buildings
Regional Italian architecture of the 1860s lovingly restored  by Carol White

The opening of Lavandula's historic farmhouse to the public gave Carol White the opportunity to think back over her restoration of it, and how the cluster of buildings inspired the creation of her beautiful open garden.

The rustica

At the heart of the farm is Aquilino Tinetti's farmhouse, constructed in traditional style of such houses in Ticino, southern Switzerland. Sitting over spacious cellars, the 6-room house has lovely proportions, thick walls, big fireplaces and chimneys with a cap characteristic of his hometown.

        

He chose to build on a stony hill, excavating down into the sandstone reef for his building stones, and creating a cool cellar which stored fresh meat and dairy foods for the family. He cleared hard red box trees from his hillsides and used a broad axe to create lintels, mantles, windowledges, steps, roofbeams and floorboards, where the gaps were pugged with stone and clay. The roof was split shingles.

His original bachelor house was a single room: Carol surmises a bed at one end, a small table and chair, and cooking on the fire in an immense hearth.

In 1870 Tinetti returned to Pontirone to farewell his parents and to marry Maria Capriroli. He brought her to live at Shepherds Flat where they raised 13 children. Aquilino extended the house with a long room over a cantina, a cool airy room for air drying pig meat and for storing grain, flour, beans, peas and maize, wine and eggs. the family ate at a long table, took a bath in a tub in front of the fire, and slept upstairs in the attic.

Nearby, a cobbled stone barn housed hay, horses and equipment in a huge space spanned by tree trunks as rafters, to which floorboards were anchored for the hayloft upstairs. The walls are formed from split slabs. Cows were milked in a timber annexe, and, in a tiny stone dairy, cream was collected from the top of the milk, then sent to the Righetti family's creamery to be churned into butter.

The Tinetti family ran the dairy farm for four generations until the milk truck no longer picked up in this district.
They also ran the Shepherds Flat post office, a suspension bridge providing access when the creek flooded in spring.

Restoration

The property had not been lived in for a while when Carol White fell in love with the golden stone buildings and their European feel. She bought it at auction and began the restoration.

  

First task was to find a stonemason to demolish and rebuild walls, relieving them of their render. He raked out the lime mortar and stabilised the stonework with cement. Carol installed a kitchen and bathroom to suit her, but with an old and northern Italian look. Plumbing and electricity were chased in.

Wanting to restore its integrity, she painted a frieze around the top of the walls on t. In the centre is the 9c church where the founding couple married. Behind is Monte Solgone where the Tinettis lived for the summer months to grow their food and garpes on terraced gardens, to milkl cows and make alpine cheeses. At the top is the coat of arms of Biasca, surrounded by the elements of Lavandula: grapes, olives, quinces, lavender and the gum trees one Italians-peakers writing home described as "looking just like broccoli".

   

The Barn needed work too: forest trees were found to replace some major structural timbers, the split tree slabs were optimised as internal walls, the milking alley skillion was rebuilt in stone, the other skillion in timber (and became Lavandula's shop). The little dairy had slid a metre down the hiil so it was deroofed, the stonework opened out, footings poured and the walls rebuilt.

  

Finally Carol could turn to the garden...

Garden stonework

Carol needed a potager, a picking garden she could dash out to for herbs, vegetables, fruit and flowers for the house. She laid out a regular pattern of beds on the creek flats below the house and espaliered crabapples as the boundary. Nearby the planted an orchard. She harvested stone from her reef, from the ford and the carpark, creating drystone walls and paving with slabs of slate.

Carol had trialled plots of lavender and it seemed happiest on the creek flats, so that's where she planted her main crop in sinuous hedges.

The garden was then fenced using roughcut timbers from the State forest and a local mill. Lines of trees and hedged emphasised the lines.

The project took two years in hours, but that was spread over 1988-1990.