AN INTRODUCTION:
Welcome to a selection of images I took while on tour with the Australian Landscape Conference last year, which I enjoyed no end. I took hundreds of images and it has taken me this long, on top of our own projects, to go through them all and pick the ones I feel best capture what I loved about these designs.
From layout to planting to the way a garden interacted with the natural landscape around it, some so neatly knitted together one could not tell where the garden ended and the natural world began, to the exquisite hard landscaping elements which offered the perfect compositions of stone and timber, concrete and steel, to highlight the interaction between the inanimate and the living, and blending these two languages, mediums, into one seamless visual and textural story. I particularly enjoyed the dance between the naturally occuring and already present, and the manmade, a careful back and forth between what to introduce, as much as what to leave out and leave well alone, how to create a garden around something existing in the landscape and bring it into the design as if it were always part of it.
We visited gardens on the Mornington Peninsula, an arm that juts toward the Bass Strait and curls back around to cradle the coastline south of Melbourne, Victoria, as a brief description for those of you joining us from outside of Australia. This is a highly varied landscape in both conditions and topography, diverse soil types from seaside to mountain top, sandy to volcanic. This land formed part of the Boonwurrung nation prior to European settlement and is now home to a highly varied demographic and a vast range of industries.
These wonderful gardens were a joy to experience firsthand, some of which I had seen featured in publications previously and was so eager to visit and equally, have the opportunity to venture into the spaces created by some of Australia’s most celebrated and admired landscape designers, whose work I have been following and fawning over for years, and get to listen to these champions of the industry discuss their creations whilst being in immersed them.
These are beautiful gardens to explore, no matter your own style or preference, as you’ll see from this album. I can only hope I represent them well, despite these images predating the incredible photography workshop I took part in with the exceptionally talented and hardworking Lean Timms , which means I am photographing better than I ever have and I only wish I had learnt what I know now when I visited these gardens. Please bare in mind that these gardens were shot much later in the day when the light is extremely harsh, and washes much out making it particularly hard to capture all the beautiful detail and colours but I did my best to do them justice.
Each image is in no particular order and jumps back and forth between gardens and is credited below with the Landscape Designer responsible.
Landscape designers featured are….
Kate Seddon - Landscape Design
Myles Broad ‘Eckersley Garden Architecture’
I sincerely hope you enjoy The Australian Landscape Conference Coastal Gardens Tour - Garden Gadabout Gallery.
As always, thank you for being here, for following our journey and for a love of all things gardening. Pip and Hugo xo
These images really show the individual styles of the designers.
The dream, to be able to visit these gardens! Happy New Year xxx