Gardens

The owners of this architecturally designed home in St Lucia, Brisbane have lived here for more than two decades. In the time since, the home (originally designed by revered Queensland architectural firm Donovan Hill – now Partners Hill) has aged gracefully, but the garden required fresh attention.

So, recently, the homeowners engaged landscape architect Dan Young to redesign the central courtyard to suit the family’s changing needs. The result is a garden that matches the rhythms and materials of the residence, and strikes the crucial balance between aesthetic appeal and functionality. It’s a sub-tropical beauty!

Michael Bates of Bates Landscape started work on this garden 12 years ago, under different owners. Once the property was sold, the new custodians re-engaged the landscape designer to rework the garden, to complement a new renovation.

Centred around the new Madeleine Blanchfield-designed residence, a bold sculptural artwork, and a desire to activate all parts of the steep and windy site, Michael’s new garden layout connects a variety of functional and aesthetic pockets through a central lawn.

Each outdoor space in this vast and varied garden is its own moment!

A great garden can completely elevate a home. But it takes a pretty special garden to transport you to a totally different hemisphere! Despite being located in the summery eastern beaches of Sydney, this dreamy garden belonging to landscape designer Anthony Wyer could easily be on a sun-scorched Greek island.

Replete with a lush, layered planting palette, pool and a sandstone cabana cave, the Boulder House garden is like being on holiday, at home! What more can we say? It’s absolute heaven.

It has the makings of a great rom-com: tricky conditions (a sloping site and large established trees), an existing lover (a pre-ordered pool), conflicting desires (the clients being a family of five) and a dashing newcomer (Mcnuttndorf Landscapes). But these landscape designers + this Fairfield backyard = the best meet-cute ever!

From these many plot lines, director and designer Lori McNutt has created an undulating backyard wonderland. Replete with veggie beds, a gin deck, a pond-like pool and a rockery filled with everything from local indigenous species to large semi-tropical plants, it has everything each member of the family asked for. And all in the delicious embrace of surrounding majestic trees. It’s a love story with a happy ending!

Before Fig Landscapes got to it, this 1-acre block in Binna Burra in the New South Wales hinterland was an empty cow paddock filled with weeds and camphor. In fact, before the clients occupied it, there wasn’t even a house here.

On purchasing the property, the the new owners relocated a traditional Queenslander to the hill, and engaged Grant Boyle of Fig Landscapes to design a garden that would reconcile the old home with its new surrounds. The result is a relaxed country garden filled with native plantings and raw, earthy materials that complement the surrounding landscape. Oh, and a pretty dreamy plunge pool!

To say this garden has undergone a transformation would be an understatement.

What was recently a large, barren plot accompanying a newly-built home in Kenthurst (39 kilometres north-west of Sydney’s CBD) is now an absolutely thriving garden for its elderly owner.

The client’s brief can be boiled down to four key elements – accessibility, refuge, social opportunity, and views – but their main request was for flowers! The resulting design by Outdoor Establishments combines seasonal colour, mature trees, and bird-attracting species, delineated by stone walls and paved areas featuring textural travertine from Eco Outdoor, to create multiple zones for eating, lounging and enjoying the garden. The perfect outcome for an extended family who love to entertain!

In 2015, we visited the incredible Northern Rivers home of jewellery designer and landscape architect Lisa Hochhauser and her husband, Robert Bleakley. The couple’s home sits on the crest of a 120 acre hinterland property, surrounded by protected natural heath. At the time, work to cultivate ten acres of unprotected land for a residential garden had only recently been completed. 

Six years after our visit (and close to ten years since its initial completion), this garden has bloomed into full maturity. With a vision to return the land to the biodiverse wilderness it would have once been, Lisa and her team at LANDstudio set out to fill it with as much endemic vegetation as they could find. The lush sub-tropical garden now sits comfortably beside the modern family home, and acres of protected heathland stretching out towards Cape Byron on the horizon.

A beautiful home is something to behold, but a beautiful home surrounded by a beautiful garden (like yesterday’s home story!) is truly next level.

If you don’t have the chops to design and plant a garden yourself, it can be intimidating to know where to start. What’s actually involved in working with a garden designer? How long does it take? And the all-important question – how much does it cost?

When a reader asked us these questions recently, we realised we didn’t have the answers ourselves, so we asked a few of our expert friends to break down the entire process: landscape designer and Peachy Green founder, Fran Hale; founder and principal of Kathleen Murphy Landscape Design, Katheleen Murphy; landscape architect and director of Svalbe & Co, Katy Svalbe; landscape designer and director of Phillip Withers, Phil Withers; and Garden Life founder and director, Richard Unsworth.

Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted to know about working with a landscape designer!

If there was ever a test-case to convince doubters on the value of a landscape designer, then this revamped courtyard in Woodend by Kathleen Murphy Landscape Design (KLMD) is it.

Previously an uninspiring stretch of bare and bedraggled residential turf running beside the length of the house, the space is now a lush and functional outdoor room comprising timber decking, an outdoor seating area, pizza oven and integrated veggie patch. Transformations are one thing when you have good bones to work with, but here, KMLD has really made something from nothing.

If you were asked you to imagine your perfect garden, what would it include? A front yard that acts like a welcome mat to your house? Paving stone steppers that wind a path through lush plants? Beds positively stuffed with soft and colourful flowers? A pizza oven?

Chances are it would look something like the Sharp Street project by Peachy Green, which contains all of these features! This gorgeous suburban garden combines family functionality with a dreamy, rambling ambience that is totally picturesque.

It’s a perfectly balanced outdoor space: every utilitarian moment is softened by greenery, foliage and flora. Put simply, this is a gardener’s garden!

So you’ve already seen the incredible treehouse that accompanies this garden in Bronte – but the key feature of this breezy family home is its connection to nature. Hugh Main of Spirit Level Designs was engaged by the homeowner (renowned architect Madeleine Blanchfield) to create a garden that works in tandem with their dreamy beach-side home.

With a steep site to contend with, and a sometimes blustery coastal climate, the final palette had to be soft as well as tough. A combination of mature trees, robust silvery cacti and green foliage creates a rich and layered oasis.

After seeing team Phillip Withers’s ‘I See Wild’ installation at Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show in 2017, Melbourne-based couple Malcolm Watkins and Peter Kerr (of PLK Interiors) engaged the landscape specialists to create a captivating garden to surround their Cera Stribley and AV-ID designed residence in Toorak. 

Comprising three separate pockets of garden that each required a distinct horticultural approach, Phil and his team devised channels of foliage that connected the landscape with the architecture, while also giving the separate sections a distinct character and function. Not to mention one seriously vibing infinity pool!

Every aspect of this Hunter Valley project by Dangar Barin Smith is ambitious. From the hillside location, to the dry, clay-like conditions of the soil, designing a garden here presented a host of challenges. But nothing was more daunting than its scale.

Luckily, a solid partnership between client and designer has resulted in an enviable garden, perfectly suited to the site’s sprawling proportions. Sometimes, it really is possible to create something out of nothing!

Anastasia Elias renovated her home in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs at the beginning of 2019, and began planting the garden in winter of the same year, just before her young family moved into their new house. In that short time, the garden has become an abundant wonderland – sprouting with vegetable patches and self-seeded flowers that scatter the meandering front grass of their own accord.

Anastasia is a self-taught gardener, and her passion for horticulture is guided by a concept called biophilia: the belief in an intense and symbiotic affinity between humans and the natural world. This approach permeates the entire garden, from the cubby house overgrown with jasmine and violets, to the lunar calendar that she uses to plot her planting cycles.

This is a deeply holistic family garden, one that is constantly informing and framing the human lives that tend it.