The Garden Gadabout

I revel in the company of one of my horticultural heroes and the small but mighty garden that is Little Cottage On a Hill, Natasha Morgan's new sanctuary, which is as beautiful, as it is clever.

Little Cottage On a Hill through the Wattle and Wire fence shrouded in perennials, roses and Silver Birches.

I once thought it quite serendipitous that at the moment Hugo and I left Tasmania and our much loved Little Oak, that one of the gardens I had found the most inspiring since leaving my corporate life to dedicate it to horticulture, was coming onto the market. To me, this garden had it all, it was perfectly in balance to the landscape it sat amongst while entirely different to it, they sat harmoniously together, structured and carefully designed, and yet effortlessly whimsical, romantic even without being frivolous. It was both ornamental and productive and the two things were seamlessly blended, luxuriantly planted in parts and masterfully restrained in others. It was no wonder that it pulsed off every magazine and book it had ever featured in and there were many, and off my screens, where I had feverishly followed everything its creator shared.

Oak and Monkey Puzzle, which incidentally are mine (the Oak) and Hugo’s (the Monkey Puzzle) symbolic family trees, weaved together in the bushlands outside of Daylesford by Landscape Architect, gardener extraordinaire and maker of all things beautiful and wholesome, Natasha Morgan, was a garden I felt destined to own. The name, the timing, the affinity I had always had with it, the inspiration it had been to me. Perhaps it was the fact that so much about the Spargo Creek property that Natasha took from a rundown former post office and general store and re-envisioned into a glowing white weatherboard sunk down into a garden against the Australian bush, that reminded me so much of our own journey of breathing new life into Little Oak, which I was in the middle of mourning the loss of.

It had felt like it was the perfect next property for us, many people had sugggested as much and so it had begun to feel like perhaps it was just meant to be but there was just one problem…..