The Winter Structure Masterclass

Most of us are taught to think of winter as the garden's empty season. It is, in truth, its most honest one — the season the colour falls away and the bones are finally laid bare, where you can read what holds a garden together and what does not yet anchor it strongly enough. Winter is when a garden shows you its design. It is also where the whole year is dreamed and planned from.

This is a very special masterclass, not a workshop — a deeper, slower, more singular day than we have offered before. It brings together a landscape architect and lifelong gardener with an internationally recognised artist, across two very different gardens five minutes apart, to look at the same idea from two directions: how structure is made, how it is read, and how, once you can see it, it holds your garden for the rest of the year.

About the Masterclass

Winter strips a garden back the way removing colour strips a painting back — to form, tone, mass and the spaces in between. Across the day, Natasha and Andrew will teach you to see your own garden that way, and to design with and for the structure that carries it through every season. Natasha brings the eye of a landscape architect trained to read space before planting; Andrew brings the eye of a painter, for whom negative space is load-bearing and the relationships between elements matter more than the elements themselves. Together they make a powerful, generous and genuinely unusual pairing — and you will leave seeing gardens, including your own, differently.

The Day

Part One — Little Cottage on a Hill, Daylesford (morning)

• Welcome and morning tea in Natasha's garden.

• An introduction to garden design and why winter is such an important time in the garden — Natasha on winter structure, reading the bones, and why winter allows us to see structure so clearly.

• A guided tour of Little Cottage on a Hill in its winter clothing — structure at the intimate 515-square-metre scale, where every element has to do more than one thing.

• A digital presentation on winter structure at Oak & Monkey Puzzle, Natasha's former five-acre garden at Spargo Creek — how a single organising gesture held an entire landscape across the year, and what that teaches us about scale and restraint.

• The tools of seeing: practical exercises in reading a garden in winter — mass and void, positive and negative space, and how to test whether your own structure truly holds.

Part Two — Stonewalls, Musk (lunch and afternoon)

• A short five-minute drive to Andrew's property at Musk, on the edge of the Wombat State Forest.

• A seasonal lunch at Stonewalls.

• A guided tour of Stonewalls with Andrew O'Brien — twenty-five acres of garden and bushland shaped through an artist's eye, and the striking black architecture set across it, read as structure, foil and form in the winter landscape.

• A closing deep dive, led by Natasha and Andrew together: building winter structure into your own garden — the principles, the plant and design decisions, and how good structure carries a garden through the rest of the year.

• Refreshments to close.

What's Included

• A day of teaching with both Natasha Morgan and Andrew O'Brien.

• Access to two private gardens — Little Cottage on a Hill and Stonewalls — with a guided tour of each.

• A digital case-study presentation on winter structure at Oak & Monkey Puzzle.

• Morning tea, a seasonal lunch, and refreshments throughout the day.

• A small group of no more than 25, for genuine access to both teachers.

What to Bring

• Warm layers and weatherproof footwear — much of the day is spent outdoors in a real cool-temperate winter.

• A camera or phone if you like to photograph as you go.

Places are strictly limited to 25, and this is a one-day-only collaboration. If a winter garden has ever felt like a season to wait out rather than learn from, this is the day to change that. Gather a friend and book early — we expect this one to go quickly.

Note: Natasha's book, The Productive Garden Companion (Murdoch Books), carries much of the thinking behind this day and is available for presale now here.

About Stonewalls & Andrew O'Brien

Andrew O'Brien is a self-taught abstract landscape painter, described by one critic as Australia's master of colour, whose work is held in private and public collections — including a commission held within the Danish royal household, created around the visit of the then Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Denmark. The former Mary Donaldson, now Queen Mary of Denmark, said his work represented the light and colour of Australia.

At Musk, five minutes from Daylesford and on the edge of the Wombat State Forest, Andrew has spent years making Stonewalls — twenty-five acres of garden and mature bushland, with his studio and a gallery among the trees, and a series of striking black barn structures whose pared-back, repeated forms give the landscape its architecture. Influenced by painters such as Sean Scully and Gerhard Richter, Andrew works in the territory where the relationships between elements, rather than the elements themselves, carry the meaning. He reads a garden the way he reads a canvas — structure first, negative space as something load-bearing, the dark ground that lets colour sing. It is a rare thing to walk a garden of this scale with the artist who made it.

About Natasha Morgan

Natasha Morgan is an award-winning landscape architect, author, educator and lifelong gardener based in Daylesford in the Victorian Central Highlands. A gardener since childhood, she came to design through study and then through fifteen years of practice across many scales — including her work on Stage Two of the Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne — while teaching landscape architecture at RMIT and the University of Melbourne.

In 2014 she made a tree change to Spargo Creek, just outside Daylesford, where she created Oak & Monkey Puzzle, an internationally recognised five-acre garden, event and horticultural property. She has since distilled the best of those lessons into her 515-square-metre Daylesford garden, Little Cottage on a Hill, proving that constraint sharpens rather than diminishes good design. Natasha also runs a small artisan preserve business, stocked across Victoria and Australia, and is a sought-after speaker, teacher and collaborator featured widely in local and international media. Her first book, The Productive Garden Companion (Murdoch Books), is available for presale now at geni.us/productivegarden.