Celebrating 3 years!!! A Before and After Album of the Garden at Moorfield.

Looking back on all our garden areas, including illustrated plans and pix, and how they've changed from then to now. It even blows our minds (and we need a nap!)

Hugo in the Rose Garden - you will see from the ‘Rose Garden’ section of this post, just how far it has come and from where, at all the different angles.

“I feel like we only just got here!” says Hugo, as I tell him we’ve just ticked over the end of our third year here at Moorfield.

I agree, though some days have felt like a decade, for the most part it feels as if we only just chinked those celebratory glasses of bubbles and delved head long into this. This being, taking ‘Moorfield’, a nearly two hundred year old former sheep station, her homestead and other outbuildings, on Dja Dja Wurrung country, and to reimagine her with the gardens for which she was once so well known and of which, none remained when we arrived but a stand of four giant Ash Trees and lots of now known invasive hedgerows. And of course, her ancient landscape and the stories it holds of the tens of thousands of years of life lived here, before she even existed.

We came at her with such gusto, we came at her with all the knowledge of having done this before, albeit on a slightly smaller scale, at our former old farm, Little Oak, where most of you first met us, more than ten years ago now, since we first began telling that story. We came at Moorfield determined to create a garden around her that could be held up to the beauty of her structures but where important, did not detract from the borrowed beauty of the vistas she gave us of rolling golden pasture and age old grasslands, snaking water ways and the ghostly majesty of River Red Gums.

The view from the southern end of the garden, looking up through the Long Border, Veg Garden, Rose Garden and Mum's Cottage, all of which did not exist 3 years ago.

We also came here to create a family home, something she had always been but only once before us, where the rooms were filled with chatter and laughter. A place where little feet bolted up and down the hallway and along the rise and fall of her land, where we could grow food and enjoy it around the table, to be a place, once again, of multi-generational living. We came here to live our life together and create something of beauty and a place to connect, for us, our family and friends, and for the people who had come to follow us over the years as we had been telling our story of the power of gardens.

Like Little Oak, Moorfield has thrown us many a curve ball and some very hard lessons, it has peeled back whatever layers were left after Little Oak and brought me further around to who I feel I was always meant to be. So, this is so much more than just a garden to us, here at Moorfield, just as Little Oak was and so many of you have shared with us over the decade or so we’ve been in this conversation with you, that your gardens too, are so much more.

So, with that in mind, you will find the most detailed look we have ever put together of the making of Moorfield thus far, which includes all the Before and After pix, and the progress in stages pix of the Rose Garden, the Dry Garden, the Long Border, the Herb Garden, the Productive Garden which includes the Vegetable Garden, the Cut Flower Garden and the Berry Patch, as well as a look at the Malus and Meadow Pollinator Garden, that we are currently working on.

We hope you enjoy and thank you for being here with us, and for celebrating 3 years of “pushing shit up hill”, as Hugo likes to call it, “both literally and figuratively” 😂 .

Pip, Hugo and family xo

The Moorfield Masterplan Map as of February 2023, some things have been added and some things altered slightly since then but it is still mostly accurate of what e are creating here.