The Victorian couple that turned tragedy into a magnificent new garden

The move, after 40 years in their last home, was a brave one. The new house and garden were charming, but by 2014, after two very hot, dry summers, the garden had grown tired. The couple also wanted to install a pool for their grandchildren to enjoy on their visits to the farm.

Furthermore, the gradual bulking up of past planting and an intrusively placed power pole partially obscured stunning views of the magically undulating countryside that surrounds them.

At some point in the decision-making process, Sandra visited Stonefields, the home and garden of Australian designer Paul Bangay, and was so impressed by the dramatic placement of his pool in the foreground of a vast view that she decided he was the man for their design job. The resulting garden looks so settled, providing the perfect transition between the charming domestic scale of the house and the immensity of the view, that it’s easy to overlook just how much reconstruction work was necessary to achieve it.

Stewart and Sandra lifted and stored the plants they loved from the existing garden. Then came the earthworks, roughing out a huge terrace to the north, necessitating high retaining walls. As these would all be outward facing, it wasn’t necessary to use fine materials for their construction: upright steel I-beams and sleepers were ade­quate for the task.

The site for the garden slopes in two directions — mostly away from the house, but there’s also a sideways slope — so it was necessary to create some internal retaining walls, and in one major case, the owners decided to use bricks recycled from a previous iteration of the garden. Other low walls adjacent to paving were clad with stone that matched the pavers, a beautiful split-face natural stone that’s sheer hell to lay: random rectangles make for a giant jigsaw puzzle, varying in thickness so that a level is only achieved by adjusting the depth of mortar beneath each piece. But the result, when done well, is very lovely indeed.

The pair love the planting designs of Dutch designer Piet Oudolf and discussed this with Paul Bangay, who has himself been influenced by Oudolf’s naturalistic style of perennial planting. So the main lawn is framed with a repetitive palette of colourful and long-flowering plants along with some box balls as permanent visual anchors. The collective effect is fabulous and looks so complex that it’s hard to believe Paul only used nine different plant species to achieve it.

Being very fire conscious, Stewart and Sandra were keen to keep the lawn permanently green. This also justified a particularly generously sized pool that could serve as an emergency water supply. While the pool is large, the paving around it is too. Even in the early days of Paul’s nearly 40-year career he recognised the benefits of ‘over-scaling’: making or providing features that really pushed the boundaries or expectations of size. Certainly, anything smaller would have looked trivial against the view.

The lawn is also large but provides a perfectly scaled ‘plinth’ on which the view comfortably sits. The planting, as floral as it is, isn’t so ‘loud’ as to upstage the view. The wings of planting form a simple open-centred bowl that lets the view speak without interruption.

Q&A with designer Paul Bangay

There was a garden around this house that had actually been open at times to the community. What was it that you immediately saw that this site needed?
The thing that attracted me to it was the fact that it was a house sitting on top of a hill, right on the precipice. I love this notion at Stonefields — we sit on top of a hill, and there’s a big drop in front of you. So you can have this garden that focuses your view: you can run gardens down the sides and let the view be the hero, not the garden be the hero. And for me, that’s just magical. If a garden feels like it’s floating in space, that’s my ideal site. This site had that, but it didn’t take advantage of it.

Your design totally changed the way the house related to the garden, as well as the way the garden related to the bigger surrounds. Would you consider that to be the primary success?
I think so. I like to think that we’re not sitting as a little island — that we are embracing what’s happening out in the landscape. Here at Stonefields, for instance, the pool garden, which faces the view, is all green in winter and spring, including our paddocks. But then when the paddocks hay off, all our planting and flowering schemes are those browns and yellows —the same colours as what’s happening out in our landscape. So I think it’s very successful if you can borrow what’s happening out there and bring it in, or focus the garden on what’s happening out in that landscape.

What do you find to be the biggest challenge when you’re working with really big views?
I know at times I’ve been in situations where there have been 360 degree views, we’re right at the top of the hill, and a client will simply not allow me to close down any part of the view. I think you need intimate moments within a garden, and so you do need to enclose some of those spaces. And when you sit on top of the hill, you need spaces that are protected from the wind. And that’s what a good garden does — it protects you. It creates beauty, but it also provides you with protection. I think that’s vital.

What are the specific challenges of pool fencing on a site with views?
It is increasingly difficult to be able to do this. You can’t use the house to isolate the pool anymore. So to put a pool in the middle of the view line is quite difficult. We tend to set the pools off to the side now so we can properly enclose them with a pool fence.

I’ve always been in two minds about glass fencing. It’s never quite as invisible or transparent as everybody hopes, is it?
And the problem, especially in the countryside, is the birds fly into them. And they get dirty, and people hate cleaning them. We are favouring the vertical steel droppers now, getting them as thin as you can, and avoiding horizontals if you can.

When I turned up for the revisit at Strath Creek, the perennial borders were just looking amazing. I was astonished to learn that there were only nine different plants used in those perennial beds. Is that limitation of diversity something you habitually attempt to achieve?
I like repetition in the border. I love the idea of diversity in the border but I just can’t seem to get my brain to do it. So I come up with nine or 11 plants that I know are going to do well, and I know that the clients will be able to grow. I tend to use blocks of plants that get repeated throughout the design. That gives you a lot of impact. And I get a lot of drama and impact from simplicity. I think repetition of blocks of things creates simplicity. That also brings harmony to the garden. That’s not to say I don’t like diversity of borders. I mean, look what Piet Oudolf does! He’s just a genius — how he does that huge diversity of plants, and the colours, and the merging. There’s nothing clashing, and they’re all of the right height. I find it mind-boggling how someone manages to pull that off. The other thing is, though, that in Europe it’s much easier to grow things than in Australia, and we found that at Strath Creek the soil’s bad. We don’t have much water. It’s super windy. You’re really not going to come up with a big palette of plants that are going to take all those harsh conditions, so we refined it down to ones that were super tough that we knew would grow there.

Over the period of your designing life, you’ve gone very much from a kind of ‘green on green’ designer through to really celebrating colour. I imagine then that the maintenance demand of your gardens has changed a lot over that time. But does the ability to find people to maintain gardens knowledgeably start to impede your design ability?
It does. It’s getting harder and harder. There’s a great skill shortage when it comes to really informed, educated gardeners, don’t you find? So it does limit what we do. One of the first questions I ask clients is: “How much maintenance are you prepared to do?” Twenty years ago nearly everybody wanted their garden as simple as possible — low maintenance. Now I’m getting lots of clients going: “We’re happy for maintenance. We’re happy to be involved in this, and we’re happy for (seasonal) change,” because that’s what creates a beautiful garden.

DESIGN CONCEPT

Planting design — perennials
There’s no group of plants that comes close to the herbaceous perennials for a vast range of colour, form, texture and mobility. Their characteristics as a group are that they last three or more years but don’t form any above-ground woody structure. The result is that most of them go through an annual period of dormancy, then reshoot from the ground to bloom at a roughly consistent height and time each year. A relatively small number don’t go dormant, but even with these, all new growth comes from the base rather than from a woody framework as it does for a tree or shrub. Perennials can be used as supporting acts in a mixed planting of trees and shrubs or can be used on their own. Traditionally, when used on their own, they were confined to a ‘perennial border’, but in the past 30 or so years they’ve been used to create huge areas of planting based roughly on a meadow or prairie. While many books have been written on planting with perennials, there are a few useful guidelines.