Renowned for presenting cutting edge ideas about landscape design, the biennial Australian Landscape Conference transcends the everyday and focuses on the ideas and concepts behind the scenes that create outstanding landscapes. Inaugurated in 2002, presenters from Australia and overseas encompass the fields of landscape architecture and design, urban planning, horticulture, art, regenerative agriculture and connection to country.
In a street of intact period homes from the 1930s and 1940s, this Spanish Mission double storeyed house is surrounded by a character filled and whimsical garden. With passionate gardeners who love to be sheltered in a green setting, inspired by natural settings and attracting bird life, the garden is a surprise from first entry.
While the rear garden was designed by KSLD and built around 2019, the front garden followed in 2022 and was linked in terms of style and materiality. Originally a harsh, darkly paved garden of mass planted Cycads and other spiky and unwelcoming vegetation, the garden now embraces the warmth and generosity of spirit that characterizes this architectural style as well as the owners.
Castlemaine crazy paving complements the tiled roof and stucco finish of the house and front wall, and sinuous rendered walls at front and rear talk to a meandering journey through garden spaces. Raised beds and freestanding productive garden beds make for a garden that is both designed for beauty and for productivity.
The new kidney shaped pool and lounging area is uncharacteristically located in the front garden, but entry through a steel gate provides a partial reveal of the front garden area, with curvilinear path and wall drawing the visitor inwards to where the pool becomes visible, as well as to the refurbished front entry portico. Here waterfall steps have been built as a nod to the period, and the previously enclosed verandah is open as a welcoming area, a place to sit, to store bikes and bags and transition inwards to the house.
At the rear, the narrow garden space appears larger with paving at two levels, a raised serpentine garden bed and canopy overhead of trailing Virginia Creeper. Plants drape from the wall, from above, from various vessels in layers of texture and colour. At the end of this space, a beautiful bird portrait by a local graffiti artist adds another element of bird life to a garden with various bird motifs throughout and which was designed to attract birds.
Plants were selected for their strong and soft forms, with native plants abounding amongst exotics. Grasses, perennials, deciduous trees and evergreen shrubs bring seasonal change in flower, leaf colour and foilage shapes. Low freestanding walls provide definition as well as a place to sit, while the timber pool fence winds gently through garden beds, creating another sculptural element in this whimsical garden.
The plant palette includes an existing Jacaranda tree, Acacia cognata, Leptospermum brachyandrum ‘Silver’, Tilia cordata ‘Greenspire’ and Grevillea
‘Elegance. Shrubs range from mounded shapes of Philotheca myoporoides, Teucrium fruticans, Acacia cognata and Correa bauerlenii, as well as colour bursts of Salvia ‘Indigo Spires’, Billy Buttons, various Anigozanthos, Eremophila ‘Blue Horizon’, Hardenbergia violacee, Santolina chamaecpyarissus and Pennisetum ‘Red Buttons.
The garden was designed by Kate Seddon Landscape Design, built by LandArt Landscapes at the front and side, and rear garden by Carl Schleiger Landscapes, with ongoing maintenance by Cultivate Horticulture, alongside the owners. The pool and spa were built by Striking Pools. Graffiti painting by artist Alex Sugar and bird bath by Willie Wildlife Sculptures.
