The garden at this cottage in Matcham, NSW, embraced its site’s vast surrounds and challenging topography.
LANDSCAPE DESIGNER CHRISTOPHER OWEN STRUCTURED THIS GARDEN IN MATCHAM, NSW, AROUND EXPANSIVE LAWNS AND SOARING TREES.
NATURE AND MAN, THE WILD and the tamed, engage in a delightful dialogue in this garden fashioned by landscape designer Christopher Owen of Fieldwork Associates. In 2016, he received a call from architect William Smart, who was working on a sandstone cottage north of Sydney on the Central Coast. “It was the start of a huge adventure,” says Christopher. “It is stunning country that I hadn’t known existed, with untouched valleys of tall, native trees.” Among them was this clearing with a cottage beside a lake. The site had been clear-felled years previously, with tonnes of imported soil creating an awkward undulating topography, with a two-metre drop to the lake. Worse were the imported “weed trees”, a congested hotchpotch cluttering the margin between the towering eucalypts, turpentine and cabbage trees, and the open areas. Christopher’s impulse was to take away things rather than add new ones. “I edited the margin, getting rid of the unwanted trees and bushes blocking the sightlines into the forest,” he says. “We treated the forest as part of the garden and celebrated it. And it opened everything up.” However, to protect the house from the western summer sun and ensure a grove-like ambience, he retained 12 mature deciduous trees, including golden elms, deodar cedars, liquidambars, tulips and plane trees, in the middle of the site. While he initially intended to create a series of courtyards — and even a pier on the lake — due to budget constraints, Christopher scaled this back to something more modest; but, he maintains, he would not have had the inspired result any other way. “It became a process of making gestures, forming shapes, and scratching out planes and grades by pushing earth around with an excavator.” But the results, an edited and softer version of his original concept, “read in a logical way”. And dropping the lawn by the lake by 100 millimetres “made an enormous impact”. The hardscaping “fell into place” with two courtyards abutting the house, both with fire pits — the main with sandstone walls, echoing the home’s cladding and “giving the garden structure”. Broad Corten steps separate >
“We treated the forest as part of the garden and celebrated it. And it opened everything up.”
the levels while dry-stacked sandstone walls create intimate rooms within, and provide human scale to a space defined by soaring trees and sweeping lawns. Recycled hardwood brings a Japanese aesthetic to simple built-in bench seats in one of the courtyards. He also refashioned the edge of the lake to create a lawn path between it and the pool. Christopher wrestled with the plantings. “It’s all about the bushland and ground planes, so I felt the grassy palette was the natural way to highlight the geometry.” Because the site could be hot and humid in summer, he introduced swathes of lawn for air circulation and as a horizontal buffer to the forest. Compact and drought-resistant Pennisetum ‘Nafray’ was the ornamental grass of choice, complemented by miscanthus, while clipped buxus gives definition to one of the courtyards, offsetting the wild grassy planes. Four formal Manchurian pears (Pyrus ussuriensis) ground the main courtyard. “I love the grasses,” says Christopher, “in full flower in summer and when the first frost hits them in winter. And, when the deciduous trees drop their leaves on them in autumn, the effect is magical. Despite being full of simple gestures and with a pared-back palette, the seasonal changes in this garden are remarkable.” Other less obvious features also resonate. “Its soft geometry is laid out to the millimetre, but people don’t see that.”
This is an edited extract from Australian Landscape Designers (Belle, $69.99). For more information, visit fieldwork.net.au