Most of the gardens we are asked to look at have been planted for an opening, not for a life. The result, almost always, is a garden that peaks in its second summer and slowly disappoints from there.
On Garden Design
When we draw a planting plan, we start with the question of what we want the garden to look like in its eighth year. A multi-trunk eucalypt that will dominate the back boundary at twelve metres needs space drawn for it now, even if it goes in as a 200-litre tree. A box hedge that will eventually read as a wall needs to be planted at three plants per metre, even though it will look thin for two seasons. The instinct to fill every gap on day one is the single most common cause of mature gardens that need to be torn out at year ten.
“The best gardens are designed for the year they will be best, not the year they are planted. A note on how we draw planting plans for the long arc.”
Our planting plans usually include three planting rounds: a structural round at hand-over, an infill round at month eighteen once we can read how the structural planting is performing, and a tuning round at year three. We treat the first three years as part of the design process, not the aftercare.
The gardens we are most proud of are the ones we are still adjusting at year five.
