When designing this garden, I was driven by both form and layout as well as by the need to create an ideal habitat for birds, pollinators and wildlife. When we started the build, there were very few birds here and now, only four years later, we have wrens, finches, silvereyes, eastern spinebills, scrubwrens, black birds and whip birds visiting and nesting in the garden as well as the usual suspects, including magpies, parrots and cockatoos. This has brought us enormous joy. When it came to creating the walled garden, I asked Wes, our builder, to source lovely old bricks so the walls would look old even though they had just been built.
In the walled garden a roof of a greenhouse pokes up above the wall . Just pictured is a gardeners shed to the left.
Abbie Melle
We have a lean-to greenhouse within the walled garden, which I often describe as the ‘work horse’ of the garden. It is a healing place for troubled plants, where we plant up and propagate, and where I over-winter my pelargoniums. One of my favourite parts of the garden is the gravel garden, which I hadn’t planned initially, but is now full of blues and pale yellows, with nepeta, verbena bonariensis, helichrysum and euphorbia to name a few. We have allowed most plants to self seed and have planted Clematis ‘golden tiara’ to scramble up the three-tier obelisks that run down the centre of the area.
A southern courtyard just outside an enclosed verandah provides the perfect spot for morning teas or extended lunches. 8th image. Two Pyrus Nivalis trees provide beautiful shade.
Abbie Melle