When we arrived, the bare landscaping was almost finished by a local Landscaper Kaya Storm from Synergy Stone who designed and installed the hard landscaping of the garden. Our team were brought in to design a planting that settled and softened the house and landscaping into its site and surrounds.

The soil is best described as mining rubble and clay. Castlemaine is a tough climate for gardening, with temperatures as low as -4 in winter and high 40s in summer. It has an average rainfall of about 600mm but even prior to climate change, this rain tends to come in heavy dumps in between long hot dry spells in summer. You can easily go for a few months without rain, only to have flash flooding when the rain comes.

Kaya came up with a brilliant solution for this, installing a dry creek bed in the backyard to draw away the heavy rainfall. From our end, we needed to select plants that could handle the hot and dry, while withstanding heavy frost in winter and the occasional waterlogging.

The outcome is a naturalistic planting of natives and tough herbaceous perennials, combined to create a soft meadow-like effect. Flowering Crepe Myrtles add an overstory and will help shield the house from sun in the hot summers, while letting the light in over those cold winters.