I spent an hour this week talking with Joel from InStyle Gardens for his podcast, and somewhere in the middle of it I heard myself once again sharing something that is at the core of what I do and believe: that I design through experience, and that the size of a garden has almost nothing to do with whether it's any good. The conversation sent me back out to the front of my own place, to five trees I think about more than is probably reasonable.
There are five Lebanese crabapples in my driveway, standing like sentinels, leading you in from the street to the studio. The driveway is also a courtyard — which is the first thing to understand about a garden of 515 square metres: nothing here is allowed to be only one thing. I chose the Lebanese crabapples, Malus trilobata, first for their narrow, upright shape, so a car can pass them without catching a branch. But each one also gives cut foliage for the table, colours in autumn, carries hard little crabapples into the cold, and right now, in the middle of June with two weeks of fog sitting over Daylesford, the five of them stand leafless and exact against the white, holding the one line a tree can hold in winter.
That is the whole principle, really. On a small block, every element has to become more than one thing or it does not earn its place. My orchard is not a row of trees in grass; it is a 27-metre espalier trained flat along the boundary, so the fruit lifts to eye level and the footprint disappears. The compost lives in tall towers I move around as the beds need them. The studio roofline extends and keeps extending — workshop, kitchen, potting shed, chickens — one gesture instead of four buildings I do not have room for. Tim Pilgrim, friend and contributor to my new book The Productive Garden Companion, who was wandering my perennial beds with me a few weeks ago, puts it most plainly: a plant has to do more than one thing, it has to earn its place across the year.
I learned to hear that demand long before I had a small garden to make it of. As an undergraduate, a visiting academic named Lee Ariav said something I have never been able to put down — that design lives in the details, that a garden is experienced up close, through the things a body actually meets. A steel edge cut so cleanly it reads as a single line. A plant holding an extraordinary seed head in winter when nothing else is doing anything at all. That idea is the thread under everything I have done since, including the work that looked, from the outside, like the opposite of a garden.
For six years I worked at Taylor Cullity Lethlean on Stage Two of the Australian Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne — a team designing a place for a minimum of a hundred years. Almost none of that century is visible when you visit. A hundred thousand plants passed through weed-testing before they were allowed near the ground. The waterways were engineered so the level never drops more than a hundred millimetres, because a hundred and one would leave a scum line and break the spell. What you actually see — the planting, the water, the long walk through it — is the icing on the cake, the thinnest layer over all that buried thinking. I have come to believe that is true of every garden worth standing in. The surface is choreography; the discipline is invisible.
The Australian Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne.
Then we moved to the country, to five derelict acres at Spargo Creek we called Oak & Monkey Puzzle, and for a good part of nine years there I quietly felt like a sellout — as though the serious work was the work I had left behind in the city. That conviction broke in a single evening this past May, at a Melbourne Design Week exhibition my old practice had called What is a Garden? I sat in a room full of landscape people — an old peer I had once tutored alongside, a former student now teaching, another now practising — all talking about gardens and plants, the very things I thought I had wandered away from. I had not left the profession. I had simply arrived early. The field was turning back toward where I already was.
And the thing that finally made it small enough to see clearly was moving here. Could I take the best of nine years on five acres and distil it onto 515 square metres without losing what made it worth doing?
It turns out you can — you just have to be more considered about every square metre. The orchard goes vertical. The kitchen, cut-flower and berry gardens learn to work together rather than each claiming its own space. The western verge, public land, becomes a reimagined perennial garden in the Piet Oudolf register, threaded with medicinals, aromatics, cut flowers and plants for the bees and the birds — everything doing more than one thing, even on a strip of council grass.
I do not have this fully worked out, and I am wary of tidying it into a lesson. What I know is mostly held in those five crabapples at the front, leafless in the fog, narrow enough to let a car pass and generous enough to give four other things besides. It was never about how much land I had. It was always about how deeply the place was made to be lived in. The discipline that built a hundred-year garden and the discipline that fits a whole life onto 515 square metres are the same discipline. I only had to get small enough to see it.
The buds will move in a few weeks. I will watch to see what the trees do next, and what I do next with them, because that is the part I have never been able to design in advance.
This is the conversation that started it: my chat with Joel on the InStyle Gardens podcast.
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You may want to check out my related content below:
The Beauty of Diverse Productive Gardens - Finding Inspiration in Every Space
The Ground Beneath Our Feet - Why I Use Gravel and How I Keep It Looking Beautiful
Solitude and Connection - Through Gardens
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Thanks so much for following along.
Natasha xx
