Landscaping
As a family that lives by the beach, we love being outdoors! It’s one of the reasons we had this vision of creating a backyard oasis that was a luscious, tropical retreat for us to enjoy and our kiddies to grow up in.
When we first bought our house, however, it was so far from this! The yard was completely overgrown and absolutely wild, more like a jungle than a garden!
Drawing inspiration from country living, with me having grown up in the British countryside, and our travel experiences through the Caribbean Islands and the British West Indies, we’ve slowly been able to completely transform the space.
The garden has most certainly transformed the exterior of our home. When we purchased our home, the garden was an overgrown jungle. (keep reading to see the before pictures!) It was utterly chaotic, with so much wasted space. We were incredibly lucky to find so many plants to salvage, nurture back to life and replant in the garden as we landscaped. Fortunately Ben has a green thumb and renovating the garden revealed his passion for landscape design. The garden has evolved immensely over time, from a small and cluttered back yard to a luscious green space for our kids to play, plant veggies and explore!
Watch here for five years of hard work transforming our garden in 30 seconds!! ha!
If you missed it, you can read all about our veggie garden on this post and all out garden plants on this post.
Here are some of my favourite design elements of our yard.
The Entrance
The moment you walk in through the front gate and close it behind you you’re welcome into an oasis. There’s two gardens either side and a little grey deck leading you up to the front door. As you take in what’s around you all you can see are layers of plants with soft purples, greens and greys which compliment our sage green windows, white painted brick and grey deck.
Curved garden beds
We enjoyed implementing a curve throughout the garden beds to add interest, shape and character to the entrance. The curve not only highlights the garden beds but helped to make them a sculptural feature with the wide range of plants we sourced and planted.
The Boardwalk
As soon as you turn the corner from the front garden and step onto the boardwalk that runs down the side of the house, you feel enveloped in lush greenery. Just walking along this boardwalk is an experience in itself, and then your eye is drawn to this focal point beyond the boardwalk, our enormous, curved bangalow palm.
The Outdoor Shower
I love walking home from the beach, opening our gate and being able to walk straight to our hot, outdoor shower. You’re standing on our deck overlooking greenery and plants and it’s so peaceful. It feels like a true holiday retreat. Sometimes I have to pinch myself that we created this!
Our Veggie garden
Ben custom created planters for our veggie gardens and painted them black to complement our backyard shed, give the whole area such a sleek, smart appearance. You can read all about our veggie garden and the process of making our veggie boxes here.
The Kids outdoor play area
We created an outdoor play zone for the kids that includes an in-built trampoline, cubby house, fort and slide, and soon-to-be-complete mud kitchen. This area used to be the “construction zone” for all of our building materials and was a bit of an eye-sore, but now it’s one of my favourite parts of the yard. You can read all about the creation of our kids outdoor play area here
The Garden View
One thing that plants and landscaping has taught us, is patience! Plants don’t grow overnight and nor does a flourishing finished garden. Every time you think you’re nearly there, something else needs attending to. Having excavated, demolished, rolled, planted, lifted, built, cut and nurtured the garden by ourselves In the last five years, I can tell you it’s a love and work in progress, it’s something we are very passionate about and grown to test our skills, especially Ben!
Our lawn is Empire Zoysia!
Above, a picture of ordering a vast array of plants ready to be planted.
Below a Before picture of the jungle when we first moved in!
Here are some of our favourite Gardening and Landscape Books:
Belle Australian Landscape Designers
The complete gardener by Monty Don
Kinfolk- How to live with nature
Want to know all the plants we planted in the garden? You can read all about it on this post.
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