canningvale sustainable garden

This garden refurbishment was recently featured in the West Australian Habitat Magazine in an article by Deryn Thorpe.

The brief from the client was to create a garden that would allow for them to travel for periods of the year without having to worry excessively about its maintenance. It was requested that the garden be inclusive of edible plants as well as a selection of natives and interesting exotic species. The clients had previously sought the services of another designer but were not inspired by the straightness and uniformity of their design. They were looking for a mixture of materials and curves rather than straight lines. We decided to create a feature raised section of the garden which we constructed using a combination of limestone, gabion baskets filled with South-west river stone and sandstone cladding with bluestone capped benches. Cradled in this garden bed was a row of Citrus interspersed with snow pears and under-planted with a mixture of herbs and succulents. The gabion baskets were furnished with three feature rusted steel bowls containing colourful succulents.

We then sought to enclose this space with a feature gabion wall punctuated with stencilled trees in cut out Cor-ten and a custom made perforated steel gate.

We created an outdoor room under the existing roof structure using polished concrete and extended this theme out into the elongated winding pathways that were hand seeded with pebbles and thin shards of Toodyay stone.

The final touch was a series of Cor-ten weathered steel vegetable tanks filled with organic soil and planted with a selection of seasonal herbs and vegetables. Surrounding these tanks were an arrangement of bluestone organic pavers bordered by ground covers.

The entire garden was reticulated using subsurface irrigation from an existing bore.

Read article about this garden
Ecological design ahead of the curve
article written by Deryn Thorpe
The West Australian newspaper
- Habitat Magazine
VIEW ARTICLE