Who are we?

Us at Little Oak in Tassie on our last day before handing her over to her new custodians and heading to country Victoria. That was in November 2021. L to R - Hugo, our daughter Nes and me, Pip.

We are Pip and Hugo, formerly of Life at Little Oak Farm, and our family, and almost two years ago now we began creating a 5 acre organic food and flower garden in Central Victoria, Australia, having just spent the last decade doing exactly this at Little Oak, in Southern Tasmania.

I am a former Fashion and Textile Designer and Exhibition, Events and Sponsorship Producer in the Creative Industries, who through it all in and retrained as a Horticulturist after discovering my love of gardening while breathing new life into an old farm and using it to relax from the stresses of my hectic working life. That was 8 years ago now and I’ve never looked back. My family are multi-generational farming so the call to the land and to live off it, runs deep and drew me back to begin my own family from the city life I chased after as a much younger me.

Hugo works in the technology sector but is fortunate enough to work from home most of the time. He is an incredibly creative soul and to his surprise after renovating our last farmhouse and building our last garden with me, incredibly handy for a man who grew up in the outer-suburbs of Australia’s largest city, Sydney after his parents brought he and siblings out from a tumultuous period in Chile’s history, where Hugo was born, to start a new life. Hugo’s father having grown up as country boy himself, inspired his sons desire to live outside of the city limits he was raised in.

The majority of what we create in our gardens, we do ourselves, we like it that way but it is also out of necessity, we do not have pots of money to make this garden with.

We are passionate about gardening, food and ornamental and all it does for those of us who know the magic of getting your hands dirty.

Why Subscribe?

We are lucky to have a beautiful community formed around Little Oak and now, The Garden at Moorfield, via Instagram, of like-minded souls, garden enthusiasts and lovers of country life, who have joined us over here on Substack. We now welcome others from all over the globe, brought here for the love of writing and reading about the journey these gardens take us on, which we have enjoyed sharing just as much over the years.

Little Oak as seen in Country Style Magazine, a story done just as we were about to leave her behind for a new adventure, hitting stands not long after we found Moorfield.

Moorfield was built in 1862 and is a former sprawling sheep station in the Goldfields of Central Victoria, Australia on what is Dja Dja Wurrung country. We feel very privileged to be her new custodians and to be able to build her a new garden where the one that once existed by the two women who raised their families here during the last two centuries, was lost over time. We have built my mum a cottage on the property near the original homestead, a deft gardener herself having grown up on my family’s farm and as a family we are creating organic food and flower gardens like the one’s our forebears grew with all we learnt from the making of Little Oak.

Moorfield, as we found her in early 2022 in Goldfields Country, Central Victoria on the land of the Dja Dja Wurrang.

You can sign up for our free monthly Garden at Moorfield Journal and the occasional other post or join our Paid Subscriber community for access to The (Moor)Field Guide with detailed plans and information about what we’re doing, including plant lists and how-to’s, our Garden Guides section focused on particular areas of the garden which are being added to all year, Cheat Sheets on growing all kinds of produce added for various seasons, as well as the Garden Gadabout, which features interviews and large galleries of images of the gardens of others that we are lcuky enough to visit. This year will see Paid Subscribers enjoy more Moorfield TV content of how-to’s and our new Design Guide section looking at garden choices between our first property, Little Oak and second property, Moorfield and why?

We hope while you’re here that you are inspired, that might learn something new, might find like-minded souls who love gardening and/or country life as much as you do and we hope, it gives you an escape into our world for a little while.

To understand my story (Pip) into gardening and then into a career in horticulture try reading The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 15 The Garden that Saved My Life. and to better understand how we came to be here, read where it all began first at The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 1 So here we are….

Thanks for checking us out, Pip, Hugo and family xo

Subscribe to The Garden at Moorfield

Musings and manuals from the making of our new organic food and flower garden at Moorfield, with all we learnt from our last one, Little Oak, and the story of how breathing new life into old farms and building them gardens, gave new meaning to our lives.

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The Garden at Moorfield

@thegardenatmoorfield

We are Pip & Hugo, horticulturist & my right hand, and our family, formerly of Life at Little Oak Farm, and this is the making of The Garden at Moorfield, our 5 acre organic food & flower garden around an 1862 homestead in the Australian countryside.