What is it about Isola Bella?

There’s no doubt that Isola Bella, on Lake Maggiore, is totally and utterly over the top.  What’s much harder to work out is how it gets away with this.  It charms you into suspending discernmen ...

A Brief History of Stone Hill - Woodend North Garden

Primarily for the benefit of those on the ALC pre-conference tour today…. Before work began on the perennial garden. Initial excavation. September 2011 Laying out the plants… After four months of ...

Warning: Big Views Get Boring

I’m sitting up in bed, re-dawn, french doors open to the following view.  Its morning number four and I’m yet to get bored with it. That’s Vesuvius in the background, the currently snoring pres ...

Unglued and undone

It’s too easy, as a designer, to find yourself delivering design solutions within a certain habitual or predictable range. In fact, I can’t help but think that it’s inevitable. And it’s not ne ...

Seconds and Centuries

Back in the years leading up to August 1661 Le Notre used recent mathematical revelations about the angle of incidence equaling the angle of reflection to design a pool at Vaux le Vicomte that perfect ...

Where to from here?

Some time in the last ten years, possibly only the last five, planting of the bulbs in various parts of Keukenhof took something of a turn away from beds of solid colour, and towards a layered effect. ...

The Aftershocks Continue...

Yet another shake-up.  Will I ever be left alone to dwell in a chubby, buffered comfort zone?  I’d barely regained my balance after being knocked for six in the gardens of the Marlborough region o ...

I'm back, and all smiles

I’m just back from Nelmac Garden Marlborough – a garden festival like no other, based in Blenheim, in the Northern-most part of the South Island of New Zealand. I boldly state ‘like no other’ ...

Of timelessness and moment

One of the unsung aspects of gardens is their super-ability to have one foot in timelessness and the other in the current moment. In a French garden, for instance, or an English garden, it’s possibl ...

The Side-benefits of Jet-lag

Seems like all you have to do to see the outrageously wonderful Michelangelo-designed square on Capitoline Hill in Rome entirely on your own is to get there at 5:30 am. Its intimacy and grandeur in pe ...

Buongiorno

Well, I’m off to Italy for a few weeks.  Leaving this afternoon.  In about 30 hours from now, I expect I’ll be sauntering through the Piazza Navona with my group, gelato in hand. Can’t wait. W ...

The Power of Paint

Flowers are pretty thin around here right now.  I’m gagging for a bit of colour.  A couple of years back I wrote about adding inorganic colour to your garden, but for some reason (can’t think wh ...

Revelations from the Revisited High Line

I can’t get enough of the High Line.  I’ve visited three times in the last two years, but now that I’m stuck for a while on the other side of the planet, I can’t understand why I didn’t go ...

On Gardening Australia

You may have seen Gardening Australia on Saturday night.  I was talking to John Patrick about a garden I designed in Woodend North, Victoria.  If you’re interested, you can catch it on iView here. ...

A Sigh of Horticultural Happiness

Just back from the USA, and lingering in a state of garden bliss. In no other two- week period of my life have I accessed such a broad spectrum of garden aspiration and achievement (except, perhaps, r ...

A Happy Accident on the High Line?

Yesterday I had the unexpected chance to hear a talk – in my own home-town, and free of charge – by Robert Hammond, Executive Director of the Friends of the High Line, and one of the two men respo ...

The Duneira dash

Had to make a quick dash up to Duneira on Mt. Macedon the other day, and turned into that incredible drive – possibly one of the loveliest in Australia – soon to be lined with millions of bluebell ...