Want some great garden ideas?
Grab some tips and trends from the professionals who showed gardens in this year’s Hidden Design Festival.
Words and images: Robin Powell
Fill the pool! Garden design by Barbara Landsberg
Frame the view
Take a cruise around Sydney harbour and you see the same multi-million dollar mistake repeated all around the shoreline. People remove the trees, thinking
they are maximising their view. So how fabulous is this! The client wanted the existing angophoras to stay, which was just fine with designer Jenny
Paul of Seed Garden Design. She added clipped balls of westringia contrasted with the fine textured movement of Lomandra ’Tanika’ and purple
fountain grass. Rather than blocking the view, the trees frame and change it so that is constantly shifts with each step you take on the terrace or
in the house. Boats and water and the far horizon slide between the silky sculpted branches of the trees in a much more alluring way than if it was
all in front of you, all the time.
Garden designer, Jenny Paul was delighted with her client's decision to keep the Angophora costata trees in her harbourside garden.
Love the built-ins
In small spaces chairs can cause of forest of legs that visually diminishes the space, and makes getting around your guests with the pitcher of margaritas
an obstacle course. Built-in seating is a clean-lined answer. In an inner city terrace courtyard Richard Rimmell for Quercus built a bench seat into
raised planting beds with maidenhair ferns enjoying the shade underneath.
Built in seating designed by Adam Robinson
In a small northern beaches courtyard designed by Adam Robinson, an L-shaped bench has wooden slats and seat, with cushions chosen to tie in with the colours
of the garden and the interior of the house. The tropical foliage of frangipani, bamboo and Strelitzia nicolae explode overhead.
Floating timber bench designed by Richard Rimmel for Quercus
Fill in the pool
When designer Barbara Landsberg, of Landsberg Garden Design, first took the call about filling in the pool in this eastern suburbs garden, she imagined
a hedged lawn, something quiet and simple so as not to detract from the view. But then she met her 86-year-old client, who is a keen gardener, and
completely changed her plans. Instead, the pool’s original coping and the old diving rock were incorporated into sinuous paths around easy-to-reach
garden beds intensely planted with a range of richly textured plants. The result is ever-changing, drawing its owner out into the garden to happily
explore and nurture its treasures every day.
Eastern suburbs garden by designer Barbara Landsberg
Succulents in the Barbara Landsberg
Trending
The trend this year in pots was roughly textured pale stone. Especially effective were Marcia Hosking’s giant, characterful pots filled with the healthiest
giant peace lily, Spathyphyllum wallisii ‘Sensation’, ever seen. (Find pots like these at Terracotta Trading, Lane Cove.) On the plant side,
we liked the blue iris, Neomarica cerulea, which is a cousin of the very useful Brazilian walking iris. Like it, this beauty handles dry shade,
but does it with glaucus blue foliage and brilliant blue flowers from summer into autumn. Matt Cantwell of Secret Gardens had it matched with felty
silver plectranthus. We also like Matt’s use of the tropical birch, Betula nigra, which has wonderful peach-tinted papery bark and a floating
feeling to the soft foliage. It is a much better choice in warm climates like Sydney, and as far north as tropical Queensland, than the cold-loving
silver birch.
Textured pale stone pots in the Marcia Hosking designed garden
Live out the front
Too often our front gardens are used for show and not for living. Marcia Hosking of Hosking Partnership turned this around for her eastern suburbs clients.
Their backyard is overlooked by towering apartments, but the front offered privacy behind a camellia hedge. Marcia pulled up the boggy and overshaded
lawn and replaced it with paving broken up by rills of native violet, added a screen of sweet-smelling evergreen magnolia and a water-feature between
two lovely weeping grafted mulberries, and atmospheric lighting. The family has been lunching and dining and entertaining out here ever since.
Outdoor living by Marcia Hosking