On Balance
Stroll through this atmospheric property on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
Meditating is a beloved daily practice for the owners of this country property. As the sun spills over the horizon every morning, they soak up the sounds of the waking landscape – and feel gratitude for the atmospheric garden they inherited when they bought the place. “Weather permitting, we love to meditate out here,” says the owner.
It’s certainly hard to imagine a more conducive location to find clarity and peace. The 8ha property is perched on a hill at Flinders, on the southern tip of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, with sweeping views to Western Port Bay. At the centre of these rolling paddocks of prime agricultural land is a large garden covering almost a hectare around the main house, a low-slung, contemporary dwelling clad in dark ink-toned zinc.
The couple bought the property in January 2016 after months of searching in the area. They had intended to use it as a holiday house, but loved it so much they soon made it their main base while retaining a bolthole in Melbourne.
Landscape designer Ben Scott created the garden for the previous owners in 2012. To a large extent, the design was dictated by the shape and materiality of the house, a project by Canny Architecture. “It’s a really simple structure with lovely earth tones,” says Ben. “We wanted the garden to be very sophisticated but also to have a natural feel.”
Ben had an almost-clean slate to work with: there was no existing cultivated garden, just areas of lawn and windswept stands of eucalypts ( Eucalyptus radiata), which he has retained and incorporated into the scheme.
The garden has been designed as “a journey of interconnected zones”, says Ben, with formal and structural planting closer to the house and more naturalistic plantings beyond. His starting point was to design a large forecourt at the front of the home comprising an expanse of granite gravel punctuated with rows of stately American maple trees. It’s a “simple, minimalistic” space that befits the scale of the home.
Connected to the forecourt are other formal zones, including a pool area enclosed by Portuguese laurel hedging and an adjacent firepit with gravel floor and symmetrical plantings of ginkgos. Further afield are hedges clipped into sinuous shapes, textural herbaceous perennials and shrubs, and banks of natives including
Poa, Lomandra, Correa alba, coastal banksia and she-oaks. The existing eucalypts have been co-opted into the garden, too, as stylised woodlands. Some are underplanted with balls of
Westringia, others with Correa alba, hedged to create ‘skirts’ at the base of their trunks. The trees’ tapered trunks and lanky branches form a recurring backdrop linking the formal garden with the bush landscape beyond.
To manage the level changes (there’s a 30m drop across the site) and link the zones, Ben designed a series of ‘earth batters’ – carefully crafted slopes – carpeted with groundcovers such as
Myoporum parvifolium and Canary Island ivy, and planted with clustered clipped balls of Westringia and Teucrium. “The zones are quite distinctive yet it’s all cohesive,” says Ben. “There’s a symmetry and structure pulling it all together.”
Having decided to make this their main residence, the owners are investing heavily in the property and have enlisted Ben to extend the garden. There are plans for a vast terraced vegetable garden, and landscaping down by the creek at the bottom of the land. They are also planting biodynamic grape vines, the crop du jour in this celebrated wine-growing district.
“It’s a privilege to live on such an amazing property,” says the owner. “We value it so much and want to invest and keep it really beautiful. We hadn’t experienced a garden like this until we moved here and feel a big responsibility to keep it special.”