Thursday 23 January 1997

`My friends are gone ... it's so hard to believe'

By JASON KOUTSOUKIS and TIM WINKLER

Graham and Jenny Lindroth were to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary next month.

Their house, at No.29 Seabreeze Avenue, Ferny Creek, was the one Mr Lindroth had always wanted. Dwarfed by eucalypts in the Dandenong Ranges, it had everything except the children they dreamed about. Mr Lindroth's parents had sold it to them.

Mr Andrew Raper, with whom both Mr and Mrs Lindroth completed horticultural apprenticeships and at whose nursery they met, said the house ``was his place''.

``I mean, he really felt that house was part of him and when he heard his parents were thinking about selling that was all he could talk about,'' Mr Raper said.

``Now that house has burnt to the ground and my two friends are gone. It's just so hard to believe ... this is a tragedy.''

Mr Lindroth started as an apprentice horticulturist at Mr Raper's Rhodo Glen wholesale nursery in The Patch, 10 minutes drive from Ferny Creek, about eight years ago.

``I've never seen someone so eager to know everything he could about plants,'' Mr Raper said. ``Graham was intelligent, single-minded and someone who loved what he did.''

A year after Mr Lindroth joined the nursery, Jenny Bell also started working at the nursery as an apprentice. ``Virtually the minute Jenny started here they became inseparable,'' Mr Raper said.

About two years after they met, the couple married at the Church of Christ in The Patch, where both were members of the church community.

According to Mr Lindroth's neighbor at Seabreeze Avenue, Mr Tas Boyce, Mr Lindroth played rugby with a club in Moorabbin, and a few years ago he won the pairs tournament at the Sassafras

lawn bowls club with his father.

``When Graham moved in across the road after his parents left, he kept up all the things his father did,'' Mr Boyce said. ``He cleared the gutters, he looked after the street. He was one of those people who cared about where he lived.''

After his four-year apprenticeship at Mr Raper's nursery, Mr Lindroth moved to another nursery, then to Norwood Industries at Knoxfield, where he specialised in documenting plant information on garden products.

Mrs Lindroth completed her apprenticeship, then took a child-care job.

``Jenny was good at her job and developed a special love for bonsai plants, but I know she wanted children,'' Mr Raper said. ``She loved them and spoke always about how she looked forward to raising her own. Yesterday I watched those fires burn on both hills surrounding my place. We spent all day frantically watering the plants, protecting the place. We finished the day with such relief and then I wake up to this.''

Mr Lindroth was the only son of Rodney and Lynette Lindroth, of South Melbourne, while Mrs Lindroth, from The Patch, was the second of Geoff and Jacqui Bell's three children.

In a statement yesterday, the families said Mr Lindroth, 26, and Mrs Lindroth, 24, had been devoted to each other.

``They were warm, caring, happy, young people with a great future and attitude to life,'' the statement said.

``They will be sorely missed by many many friends and family.''