New Beginning—Collaborative Garden With Colour, Movement & Meaning
Only two years old, this garden creates shapes that change with the seasons – as waving seeds and flowers wilt and fall, others rise in another place.
A recent addition – the boys' rooms are sheltered by a stepped wall made from vintage terracotta pipes.
Simon shifted some big old olive trees; they are good shelter and the muted tone of the leaves makes a nice backdrop in an outdoors eating area.
All the paths in this garden are windy – granitic sand blurs the edges and creates a soft, wild effect.
Strobilanthes gossypinus, Miscanthus transmorrisonensis, Phormium ‘Anna Red’ Hakea ‘Bicolour’.
Two horticulturists worked with empathy and in close collaboration to create a garden of colour, movement and meaning.
This loose and breezy garden on the Mornington Peninsula is truly romantic – a rambling celebration of getting back together, getting grubby and getting on with it.
After few years of separation, Jo Ferguson left her home and garden at Merricks Beach to move into her husband’s house at Flinders to work together on the garden. She reckons the open- hearted consideration of each other’s wishes for the plan and planting for the garden helped reconnect them. Acknowledging that all people have different reasons for wanting the things they want was a really good way to heal.
On top of the hill in Flinders looking down, down past rolling hills to Cyril’s reef break, the house is simple and straight but the windows and views and garden make the place breathtaking. “Simon had an idea to knock the house down, but I said: ‘Nah, the house is fine – let’s make it beautiful.’”
Simon and Jo are both horticulturists. Simon’s work is mainly focused around big, big works; highway plantings and large-scale landscaping, while Jo has concentrated on smaller-scale gardens for homes and small properties. They both made a garden together at their house at Merricks, concentrating on indigenous plants of the peninsula, collecting seeds and cultivating local grasses to plant for their house there.
A game changer for Jo was a weekend course she did on healing gardens with Betsy-Sue of Dirtscape Dreaming. The idea for the course was to teach designers how to design gardens for clients (and themselves) that could transcend the normal considerations and be used to soften past hurts or feelings of frustration and sadness. Getting inside the head of the person you are designing a garden for – or with – to find out what they really want. After all, gardens mean a lot.
“It was such a fantastic course,” says Jo. “One of the questions we were asked to consider was: Where did you go when you were sad when you were little?” Some people said they would go into a tree, or a group of bushes or into the grasses.”
“When you’re designing a garden, you can recreate those special places for people within their own gardens – so they can go and remember being a kid and nurture themselves. A healing place… that will tap into that feeling in childhood where you can freely feel those emotions – ’cause the more you can honestly feel those feelings, the more they dissipate.”
“It’s really interesting how even just thinking that way can bring up really clear ideas about what people want from a garden. Some people want to recreate those childhood places, others want to try and get away from them. I had one client who grew up in hot dry country, she wanted a garden that would be an antidote to those hot memories – a lush, green place to cool and soothe.”
“It’s [about] finding those landscapes of the imagination. For this place – for me – I wanted to be able to look through grasses, and I wanted to be able to walk on sand in wildness (like my childhood on the beach in Merricks), and for Simon it was bees and flowers (perennials) and white trunks. So that’s what this garden is. It’s a place for us both, together.”
Some of the property was mapped out by Simon when he first moved here. A huge vegetable patch and an apple orchard are in full swing, along with a little olive grove created by moving some knotted old trees to this new home.
The kids have also been moved by the healing effect of the garden, happy to slip into the scheme of things. One of the boys planted a grove of tiny oak trees a few years ago – a trip to the botanic gardens helped with the spacing and the family worked it out together making sure they had lots of room to grow.
In-between and through the immovable points in the garden, the oaks, the shed, the house, the orchard, Jo’s drifts of waving grasses and Simon’s flowers for the bees blur the starts and finishes and hold everything together with bands of colour and movement.
