Blog

I was amused, relieved, and a little embarrassed a few weeks back when a respected and long-standing Landscape Architect stated, in a meeting of industry leaders, something along the lines of ‘what ...

We’re all obsessed with making our gardens LOOK good, but the outcomes may be better if we spent more time thinking about how they FEEL. Interested in mastering the balance of a garden that looks gr ...

It’s astonishing how few opportunities there are available for the home gardener that is keen to learn more. So it’s time to run some courses.  I’ve been talking about it since I started this b ...

There’s two particular questions that I’m always dealing with when designing a garden, or evaluating an existing one.  I’ve been dealing with them for years, though they’ve only recently emer ...

I remember a few years back being struck by the point made in an architectural book that one of the best ways of making low ceiling heights less oppressive was to bring the ceiling down lower still in ...

Not quite twenty years ago a single image in a movie spawned – for me – a whole new way of looking at gardens. It was just a passing moment in Sally Potter’s Orlando.  If you haven’t seen thi ...

Many of the pleasures of gardening are direct and overt, and others just lurk beyond grasp-ability.  Some are concrete, some just suggested or hinted at. Benches and garden seats, for instance, are a ...

I’d hoped to have my wall finished before heading off on this tour to the US in May.  But time ran short, and I did that rotten thing, right near the end of a project, when you suddenly think of so ...

I was dashing through Melbourne the other day, and hurtled past a high-walled garden over which peeped the Dr. Suessy tops of one of the taller aloes, like Aloe arborescens or Aloe bainesii.  The wal ...

This has to be quick.  I’m writing between itinerary items on a USA garden tour, and there’s only ever snatched moments. I had reason yesterday to wonder again about the challenges of translating ...

Most of what I do professionally is biggish to big.  I’ll be ordering perennials, for instance, with 150 or this and 200 of that, totaling in the thousands.   I love using plants in vast, repeati ...

Of course it depends on your terms of reference. A year seems incredibly quick to me, to achieve a full and floriferous garden. But I have had people question me on my garden that I created and opened ...

We McCoys went walking in Wilsons Prom on the long weekend.  Good weather rarely falls within my otherwise rich and wide blessing-spectrum, so I can only assume that we were among the many beneficiar ...

Even in these enlightened days in which your average home gardener can see the beauty and season-stretching power of foliage and textural seed-heads, there’s no denying that flowers make up about 95 ...