REVIVING THE LAND

GARDEN

When Bruce Honey found this property, the soil was in poor health and covered in weeds but now, after 20 years, it has been rejuvenated.

DRAWING UP A MASTER plan for the garden of your dreams is a great strategy. Whether you move into an existing garden — overgrown or over neat — or whether you are starting from scratch with bare ground, it helps to write down all your favourite must-have plants, thoughts and ideas. The trouble is for most of us, as the years pass, the master plan remains largely theory and never becomes a grand reality.

However, there are some dedicated gardeners who do stick to their original plan and Verdicus, a 3.6-hectare garden at Tylden in Central Victoria, an hour’s drive from Melbourne, is an excellent example. The sweeping lawns, flower-filled garden beds and banks of trees are today all part of a design set out by owner Bruce Honey in 2001 who chose the circle as the central motif leading to the garden’s name Verdicus, which translates to ‘green circles’. The plan even included the main house — carefully sited among the neatly-sketched driveway and trees — which was not built until late 2017.

“The paddocks that I bought nearly 20 years ago were degraded farmland, with blackberries and gorse, and not a tree in sight,” says landscape designer Bruce. The fact that the property was rolling countryside held great appeal as he believes flat land lends itself to a formal garden with extensive hedging and he didn’t want to have contend with lots of clipping and pruning. “They need to look spotless all the time,” he says.

“As I grew up on a farm and had been designing broadscale rural gardens for a long time, this was my chance to make a garden that was my own playground, without space restrictions and clients’ dictates,” says the 62-year-old who came to landscaping late, studying garden design at Melbourne’s Burnley College in his late thirties. “Here at Tylden a particular attraction is the four seasons, even though winter can be wet and cold and the summers hot and dry. The soil is fertile, if heavy.”

“When I started, there were no roads, dams, fencing, water or power on the site,” Bruce continues. “And my gardening was weekends only until the last couple of years. Working to the plan, we did the hard landscaping in 2003 — dams, terraces, and driveways. Then we really concentrated on the structural plantings, such as the avenues, screening and boundary hedges. My aim has been a fusion of a picturesque ethos with some formality.”

Major earthworks in the garden plan included creating a curving driveway gently winding uphill between two dams. The dams were then framed by trees yet keeping an axis with a distant view to Mount Macedon. Today, on arrival, >

“The paddocks that I bought nearly 20 years ago were degraded farmland, with blackberries and gorse, and not a tree in sight.”

the vista from the front verandah is of a circular, smooth lawn punctuated by a charming small pond with bubbling water with the mountain just visible. The visual trick is the infinity edge to the lawn at the far end that ensures the eye is carried to the furthest point.

Bruce has created several intense and controlled garden spaces filled with colourful, massed plantings. He has given them particular names such as the Crescent Parterre, Tapestry Garden, Hub Garden and White Borders. They act as counterpoints to the lawns, trees and informal shrubberies out near the garden boundaries.

The planting of the Crescent Parterre, for example, is based on the intricate design of an oriental carpet. Pink, burgundy and white blooms fill the box-edged beds. The exuberant planting of tulips, followed by hundreds of Asiatic lilies and then striking dahlias in shades of burgundy make it an ever-exciting display. The burgundy shades of the flowers are echoed overhead by a canopy of the crabapple, Malus ‘Strawberry Parfait’.

The Hub Garden, however, at the top of the drive features a single rose cultivar — a mass planting of the much admired ‘Burgundy Iceberg’; they make a sensational statement.

The White Borders, surprisingly successful beneath tall spotted gums (Eucalyptus maculata), is a textbook lesson in how to integrate exotic and indigenous plantings.

Tall white snapdragons grow alongside clipped silvery westringia and small violas run through clumps of native grasses to show Bruce’s interest in form and texture.

Bruce has been careful to balance the busyness of these intense plantings with voids and gentle horizontals of uncluttered grass. What he describes as the marquee lawn is a good example. From the kitchen window an expanse of lawn spreads to a low hedge of Viburnum tinus

planted in front of a row of Japanese elms (Zelkova serrata).

Behind the trees is a cypress hedge — all the layers of green creating a calm atmosphere.

In a carefully hidden glasshouse, Bruce has propagated many of the garden’s plants himself. “In a garden of this scale you need hundreds of plants, not just one or two, particularly for hedging, large drifts and seasonal annuals,” he explains. “We don’t have the resources to focus on the rare and exotic so we like to grow plants that thrive in our climate. I like to think of the garden as extraordinary, with tried and true plants used well.”

A view of the main house at Verdicus, an expansive garden at Tylden in Central Victoria, which is framed by golden weeping willows. The entrance driveway winds between two dams.

CLOCKWISE, FROM ABOVE The view across the Crescent Parterre and to the house at Verdicus. The trunks of the birch trees, planted 20 years ago, complement the home’s architecture; shady groves of trees, such as these Acer negundo ‘Sensation’, an incredibly drought-tolerant maple cultivar, contribute to the garden’s inviting atmosphere; a reverse view from the house looking across the lawn to an infinity edge above the dam and then to the borrowed landscape of distant hills; brick pillars and iron gates at the garden’s entrance; the beautifully planned axis where the vertical trunks of ash trees are interrupted by the horizontals of photinia hedges — the ash trees were chosen for their uniformity of growth and at the centre of lawn is a long rectangular bed of bearded iris; Onslow the Owl by Melbourne-based chainsaw carver Angie Polglaze keeps a watchful eye.

The White Borders are a great example of how to manipulate light and shade in a garden. The dark cypress hedge serves as a backdrop to the trunks of the spotted gums, Eucalyptus maculata, with the textural contrasts of foliage and flowers making an enticing carpet beneath.

CLOCKWISE, FROM ABOVE Petals from the delightful crabapple, Malus ‘Strawberry Parfait’ decorate the box hedges in the Crescent Parterre, which has been designed to resemble an oriental carpet in its flower colours and arrangement; a wider view of the garden’s harmonious geometry; organised order in the vegetable garden, sheltered by a cypress hedge; looking from the guest cottage, where firewood is neatly stacked for the winter months, to the house; a bird’s eye view of the garden’s carefully thought out geometry showing how the main axis ends in the blue garden with a large sculpture of an egg as the primary focus; Bruce commissioned renowned chainsaw carver Angie Polglaze to carve these acorns to decorate the lawn where a dozen different oak cultivars have been planted. The weather has turned the acorns a beautiful silvery grey colour.