Gardens

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.

This suburban family garden in Hunters Hill has been tended to by the same owners since 2004, whose stewardship oversaw planting of an excellent foundation palette over the last decade. These loving efforts of the amateur gardeners have now been built upon by landscape architect Hugh Burnett.

The clients engaged Hugh and Ballast Landscape builders to add some structure to their beloved green space, uniting the many functions of this high-use space with its lovingly nurtured character.

The efforts of a landscape designer are usually concentrated towards the rear of the property, where a private sanctuary can be nurtured in relative privacy, hidden from the street. Not here!

This Camberwell project by Bethany Williamson Landscape Architecture is a celebration of the front garden. Subbing out the traditional lawn for a space layered with different heights, explosive colours and varied textures, this often overlooked domain is given all the attention it deserves!

The garden accompanying this Federation home in Mosman, Sydney was already beautiful and grand, but the design needed consolidating to suit the modern day. 

Following a string of designers who worked on the garden in the past 100 years (the most recent being Peter Fudge), Wyer & Co stepped in to improve the functionality of the space. 

The landscape designers have since updated the extensive 1412 square metre garden, tying it all together with a varied plant palette.

Practicality was the key driver behind this Sydney garden makeover, but the vision of property owner and landscape designer Julian Bombardiere, owner of Ballast Landscape, has resulted in a lush and inspiring, yet still functional, space.

With careful planning and expertise, Julian has turned the once barren backyard into a layered garden full of interesting plant life, spread across several multipurpose zones.

It’s safe to say that 2020 was the year almost EVERYONE was happy to have a green space to retreat to – and if they didn’t, looking at others’ was (hopefully) the next best thing!

These are the outdoor oases that gave us calm and serenity in a year we spent locked inside. From rooftop pools to centuries-old acreages, suburban backyards and sprawling regional paradises – we love each and every one of these pockets of private wilderness!