Gang of Four—Trentham Garden by Local Star Tim Pilgrim
Drawing on favourite inspirations Piet Oudolf, Jinny Blom and Dan Pearson, Tim Pilgrim created this garden in a lovely lush Central Victorian town.
Walter Funcke (Stachys byzantina achillea) and Caradonna (Salvia nemorosa) with balls of Tuecrium fruticans.
Balls of Teucrium fruticans and feature trees of Pyrus salicifolia are planted with Stachys byzantina, Susanna Mitchell (Anthemis) and Walker's Low (Nepeta Racemosa).
On a little patch in a little town, a local garden star creates a space that borrows from changing light and adjacent greenery to form an elegant sum of its parts
Gardener Tim Pilgrim is a bit of a big deal in central Victoria … he’s definitely got a recognisable style. His garden designs have a particular quality that is easy to spot: formal, closely clipped shapes at varied heights hold a living formwork for all the other wild, wanton and floppy growth in between. His seasonal plantings are like a slow-moving light show as each plant has its moment to show its stuff.
Rhonda’s garden holds all the hallmarks of Tim’s style. She has lived in Trentham for years, owning and running The Green Store, selling homeware products for living well with low impact. She sells stuff from local makers as well as all the good things people are making for cleaning, cooking and gardening, without buggering up the planet. Both of her daughters work in the shop. It’s a lovely family-run business and Tim also worked there for a bit.
When her daughter decided to subdivide her local block, Rhonda bought the back half paddock to build her house. Rhonda’s sonin- law, Will Wapling, is a carpenter and builder, and Tim, Will and Rhonda’s daughter are best mates. It’s the way it goes around there. So Rhonda hired Will to build the house and Tim to do the garden. They were all in understanding, it was a perfect scenario of informal chats and casual trust for a nice outcome.
Tim first gave Rhonda a bit of a plan in 2019. The house was being built and it was a good time to talk about the garden but then Covid hit. It wasn’t quite as bad in the country, but it was bad. Nurseries closed, people were putting projects on hold. No-one was starting anything new.
“So it was that first round of Covid – you know, everyone thought the world was ending,” says Tim. “I lost a lot of work during that time. People were – rightfully – terrified about what was going to happen. Rhonda was one of the few jobs that said ‘let’s go ahead’.” He had a lot of time and space. “Because there wasn’t much going on, I could relax and lean into it. I could almost design the planting on the fly and plant it in real time,” he says.
Tim and his wife lived nearby during this time. He had worked at The Diggers Club’s The Garden Of St Erth in nearby Blackwood for a few years and it gave him a great knowledge of the soil and types of plants that were going to love it and thrive in the area. The site was narrow. The house was pushed up to the southern boundary and so the space left for the garden was skinny.
Tim’s plan curved a path through the garden. “To allow for deeper pockets,” he says. “We wanted to do a more stacked and layered planting. We used the soil we pushed off the paths to make mounds and raise some of the garden beds.” One day of Bobcat hire shoved soil around and off paths in this narrow space and created a curving path through ups and downs and clever planting. It served as a great way to form an interesting view in a flat stretch. And simply moving soil into small mounds made for a landscape that’s much more fun to plant. Lovely trees that need more drainage can be planted on tussocks while all the other plantings find their places.
A big consideration in plant choices was the borrowed landscape. “It’s one of the first things I look at”, says garden’s naturalistic style spoke to being so close to the Wombat State Forest, so I tried to make it kind of grassy and natural, but also it’s in a really old part of town so there’s lots of European style trees and plants. So we tried to bring the landscape in as much as we could.”
This borrowed landscape is particularly highlighted in autumn. European trees in local yards, across the street and on adjacent blocks change colour and these hues are perfectly in tune with the rotating light show in Rhonda’s garden. In this sense he has created, on a little block in a little town, a grand moving feast.
