Our house is built on 6 acres of land. About a third of this is native bush and pretty inaccessible. So how do you turn what was a field and building site into a beautiful and productive patch of land?
Well, much like you need an architect building a house it’s always good to have a landscape architect to help you realise your gardening dreams. Can you tell my closest friends at university were landscape architects who’ve instilled respect for this profession?
We commissioned the services of Jamie Reid – a fellow Brit who instantly got what we were trying to do and came up with a spot on interpretation of our brief. He created a concept plan that incorporates:
- lots of desiduous trees so we can tell the seasons
- a lawn for the bassets to play on
- an ornamental kitchen garden to feed us
- salad and herb bed on hand from the back door
- gardens that will root the house to the landscape.
It’s a long term project that will require the removal of masses of gorse that’s been stifling our native bush. Not to mention stacks of hard work to create any sort of cultivated garden. Never fear, we have a shelf full of every possible gardening book to help us create our kitchen garden and are revisiting vintage Geoffrey Hamilton programmes to inspire us!
If you have the stamina you can catch up with all our gardening efforts.
