This property originally consisted of a house and garage on a cleared sandy site, with no driveway or landscaping. The clients’ brief to me was to create a rambling European style garden with fragrance and seasonal changes.

Set within a patch of remnant banksia woodland, it is unusual to find a property with a large scale garden like this in the middle of suburbia. Sweeps of native grasses have been used to link the garden to the surrounding bushland and existing banksias. I also made extensive use of advanced trees. Liquid Amber trees line a sandstone driveway leading into a romantic garden with plantings of citrus, olives, weeping mulberry, tupelo, Chinese pistachio, gleditsia and sheoaks.

I proposed some limestone seating and a handcrafted pond, and the stonemason who constructed them took care to select aged limestone with character. To the rear of the garden there is some interesting topography, with a large circular grass berm which has been planted with a grove of sheoaks. There was excess soil when the back of the property was levelled, so I suggested shaping it up in this way, and the children now enjoy playing on it.

A large frangipani was sourced and planted near the deck area to give some fragrance and tree ferns add some lovely shapes to the understorey. Mass planting of David Austin roses, lavender, wisteria, rosemary, murraya, arthropodium, ivy geranium, daisies, agapanthus, azalea and alstroemeria provide seasonal colour and fragrance.