The brief for this 1acre property was to create a native inspired garden that was low maintenance, had no lawn, was open and easily accessible, and would not block the mountain views to the north.

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The site was handed over to me 'nude' so to speak apart from 2 trees and a very large, newly built house. The ideas was to get the garden to out-scale the house and ground it into it's surroundings. 

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While Gippsland if famous for it's fertile volcanic soils, we were left with a lot of subsurface clay left on the surface from the digging of the house site and septic. There was also very poor drainage in some areas due to intermittent run-off from the property above. These issues we rectified with tonnes (literally tonnes) of compost and fast breaking mulch. The final constraint was a relatively small budget relative to the size of the garden. This was overcome by using local materials such as road sand for paths, and planting tubestock where possible.​