Thankyou so much for my garden, I really enjoy pottering around everyday and watching things slowly change, there is always something happening!

This is a garden that has been totally transformed in the space of 12 months, the owner wanted a formal native garden in keeping with her home and the suburb where she lives. I went to visit and do the first shaping of the shrubs which have flourished over the last 6 months. The image below was taken upon my first site visit in March last year. The garden consisted of Buxus and Murraya hedges, lawn and a set pathway.

 

The brief was to introduce flowering native plants and reduce maintenance, hence it was easy to convince them to get rid of the lawn. The client is already a keen gardener with excellent taste and a pretty good knowledge of native plants, the building on the right is a garage and the whole garden faces south so sun is an issue in some areas. The garden slopes down towards the street and there are some sandstone steps that were retained and the whole look needed to combine with the house.

We chose a crushed decomposed granite as a surface as I wanted to open the space up and lighten it, the brick of the house is very dark and as it is two storey a little imposing. Many silver or grey foliaged plants were chosen to lift the area as were plants with soft weeping foliage.

Basically, the space has been turned into a garden for a ‘gardener’, where once was simply a green entrance space, a place you crossed to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’, there is now reason to stop and look and admire.

 

Above you can see the garage which will slowly disappear behind the Acacica ‘Burgundy Cascades’ which have grown to 1.5 metres high and the same wide in 6 months! The ground cover Grevillea curviloba has also done extremely well and these photos are taken after I cut them back.

 

Above is a photo of Acacia baileyana Standard, planted as a feature near the entrance, in the background are Grevillea olivacea Red and Leptospermum laeviegatum, which will be pruned to screen.

For the low mounding shrubs I used Baeckea virgata Dwarf, Leptospermum ‘Foreshore’ and Rhagodia spinescens. For the taller compact shrubs there was Callitris oblongifolia Dwarf (seen above), Banksia ‘Sentinel’, Grevillea olivacea Red, Acacia ‘Burgundy Cascade’ and Ceratopetalum ‘Red, Red, Red’.

I failed to get a really good shot of the garden from the street, it was mid day summer sun and difficult to photograph, so you will have to believe me when I tell you that the garden is quite a statement from the street, unlike anything else in this particular pocket of Sydney. I think once everything is pruned up and shaped it will likely be even more of a bold statement, so stay tuned for an image update, I am certainly looking forward to going back at the end of the year with my hedge clippers 😉