Gardens

It’s a landscape designer’s dream to be offered a large site and the freedom to create any garden of their choosing.

This very scenario resulted in this Black Rock garden by Andrew Panton Design, which combines overflowing foliage, formal hedging, and tropical beach elements relevant to its bayside Melbourne location. 

Designed with year-round interest firmly in mind, the garden is divided into sections highlighting perennials that bloom throughout the seasons.

If life had turned out the way Andy Kepitis initially planned, he’d be spending his days in front of a computer working as an accountant – not tending to cacti and succulents in his backyard!

It wasn’t until studying at university that Andy discovered his love for plants, leading him down an entirely different career path, to found kep Horticulture. 

We caught up with Andy in his Northcote garden to learn about his horticulture practice, garden philosophy, and the value in loving what you do. 

Landscape architect Liz Herbert from Openwork describes a “healing garden” as a plant-dominated environment designed to meet the physical, psychological, social, and spatial needs of users. Whilst these spaces are often linked to hospitals, nursing homes and other health-related environments, Melbourne’s newest healing garden sits within the grounds of Heide Museum of Modern Art! 

Designed by Openwork, this beautiful new garden combines elements of conventional therapy and healing, with productive and edible gardens, and spaces intended for art and play.

Located on the site of Heide co-founder Sunday Reed’s first kitchen garden (later repositioned), this new environment reflects the late art patron’s keen interest in the symbolic and medicinal properties of plants, as well as Heide’s growing desire to provide restorative spaces for visitors of all ages and abilities.

If there is one category that never fails to appease our audience, it is gardens. No matter your taste, it seems that a thoughtfully designed garden is a perennial crowd-pleaser!

From a magical hidden flower garden in Ivanhoe, to an amazingly abundant lawn-free garden in Melbourne’s inner suburbs – to a pair of lifetime gardeners tending to their plot in Woodend, these are the best gardens we featured this year.

Rose Hawkins bought her organic garlic farm five kilometres north of Tenterfield, NSW three years ago. With an altitude of 850 metres, the property has four distinct seasons, crisp air, pristine spring water and a temperate, Mediterranean climate.

Here, among olive groves and fig trees, Rose grows garlic and dahlias and other produce. Setting foot on her farm is like entering a peaceful between-world, where the rhythms of the running stream and the rolling hillocks drown out the pace of daily life.

The last time we caught up with Clea Cregan it was way back in 2016, when she was creating terrariums under her business, Miniscapes. These days, terrariums are just a small part of the Miniscape Projects offering, which is now a fully-fledged landscaping service.

Sean Fennessy’s beautiful, rolling garden at his epic Fisher House? Yep, she did that!

Clea’s approach to cultivating the perfect green space is refreshingly lawless. She likes it best when plants sit well together, evolve into new beings, and create a strong sense of place.

Entering Petrina Burrill‘s Ivanhoe garden is like stepping into another world – as close to Narnia as you can get in suburban Melbourne. It’s a complete sensory experience that makes your jaw drop, your eyes widen, and your heart swell.

Petrina’s garden is, in fact, a suburban, sustainable micro flower farm. Here, she creates beautiful hand-picked bouquets for friends and strangers, bringing joy to all who stumble across her little patch of heaven.

The suburb of Haberfield in inner-west Sydney is a traditionally working class neighbourhood, though its proximity to the CBD has accelerated its gentrification in recent years. When Christopher Owen of Fieldwork was engaged to complete this garden in the suburb, he was torn on how to balance his love for the nostalgic, characterful space that had been in the previous owner’s family for decades, with his client’s brief for a contemporary garden.

He settled on a design that respected the garden’s legacy as a family space, by creating a new site ripe for the next generation of memories to take place. And it’s gorgeous!

On an eight acre property nestled in a deep valley along the flank of Mount Witheren in Canungra, South East Queensland, is a slice of pure heaven. Pretty Produce is the multi-award winning chemical-free flower farm of Simone and Dave Jelley, where they grow and sell fresh produce and edible flowers to top restaurants around the country, and to customers through their online store. But it was only eight years ago that Simone was working in a completely different field (so to speak!).

Here, Simone takes us on a tour of Pretty Produce, her pride and joy, and tells us the story.

There was always plenty to love about this Edwardian in Fitzroy North, but the previous interiors were basic, and the garden almost entirely devoid of foliage.

With the architectural expertise of Buck & Simple and garden prowess of Inge Jabra Landscapes, the home now is open and airy, showcasing a design as distinguished as its gorgeous Edwardian facade.

John and Jenny Shaw are lifelong gardeners, and their half acre plot in Woodend is an expression of their lives. Planted without reason or design, it’s a rambling and intuitive space that resists construction. Even defintion. There’s a mannagum tree over 300 years old, beside random plants gifted to John and Jenny by friends. John describes it as a ‘serendipitous’ place, a lived-in garden filled with tokens of the couple’s near 50-year stewardship of the property.

This space of cultivated landscape has seen John and Jenny’s children grow from infants to adults, even hosting one of their weddings decades later. Their son, Ben Shaw, has gone into a career in permaculture – no doubt inspired by a childhood spent soaking up this loving family garden. 

It’s a very special place.

Garden stories are some of our most popular reads on TDF these days – take a look at the news cycle in the last 18 months and it’s not hard to work out why! There’s nothing more calming than bathing in the beauty of a glorious planting scheme, and landscape designers are the ones responsible for that instant tranquility.

They are the craftspeople taming the space between the domestic and wild, and it’s about time they got some recognition! From industry legends to newcomers, these are the 12 outstanding projects shortlisted in the Landscape Design category of the TDF + Laminex Design Awards 2021.

This category is proudly sponsored by Eco Outdoor.

Whether it’s touring through his legendary home garden at Stonefields, or joining him for a guided tour of the beautiful Daylesford region, everybody loves Paul Bangay! So much so, in fact, that his classic book Paul Bangay’s Guide to Plants has recently been updated and re-released in a new expanded edition.

With tips for gardens in a changing climate, anecdotes and insights into successful landscape design, this fresh edition features two new chapters!

Read on below for an extract on how to choose the perfect plant for your garden: big or small!

Unlike many coastal properties, the brief for this garden on the Mornington Peninsula was to create seclusion and sanctuary, rather than to maximise beach views.

In response to the sprawling site, Ian Barker Gardens designed a varied, six-part layout encompassing outdoor entertaining, a sunset terrace, a pool, fire-pit and luscious flowery plantings. It’s a ‘secret garden’ filled with unexpected delights!