Bold moves

For a modernist house near Melbourne, designer Michael McCoy has created a perennial garden that sits like an island of colour in its Australian landscape

Australia is a country that likes to embrace new ideas. Perhaps inspired by the modernist houses that are the hallmark of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt, Australians seem more open than many of their UK counterparts to the idea of making a bold statement with the architecture of their house. This certainly seems true of Gerald and Sue Moriarty, whose house, some 39 miles northwest of Melbourne, is a strikingly elegant modular design with clean lines and floor-toceiling windows that make the most of the property’s spectacular views out over the Mount Macedon Ranges and the mysterious Hanging Rock. For their garden the couple wanted to make an equally bold statement. Inspired by the gardens created by the likes of Piet Oudolf, Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden, and by Keith Wiley’s garden, Wildside, the couple wanted to create a dry perennial garden that would complement the house, and they commissioned designer Michael McCoy to come up with a plan. From the start one thing both Michael and his clients were agreed on was that the house should sit in an uncluttered, unplanted space.

“You don’t build a bold, minimalist house and work hard to soften it,” says Michael. Instead, Michael has kept both the perennial garden – and the quarry garden that followed – very deliberately out of view of the house, as both destinations and locations in their own right.

In the first of these, the perennials have been planted edge to edge, waist to chest height. Surrounded by trees and shrubs, this enclosed, almost circular garden was inspired in part by the walled gardens that were once found in almost every country estate in the UK, but this is a far more informal affair with billowing euphorbias, escaping foxgloves, and beds that are not borders. Within the garden, Michael

From the start one thing both Michael and his clients were all agreed on was that the house should sit in an uncluttered, unplanted space

worked on the planting-design principle that at any point whatever plant is immediately in front of you is echoed four or five times into the distance. Each plant is also there in your peripheral vision, so that no single strong colour dominates the planting or draws your eye to one place.

In Australia, designing with perennials is challenging, especially in terms of colour palette, because available plants are extremely limited, but for Michael, who at the start of his gardening career, lived and worked at Great Dixter learning from the late, great Christopher Lloyd, this was all part of the challenge. “There is such a thing as too much choice,” he says. “Limitation can be liberating.”

This Australian garden is more than the sum of its parts, and the planting perhaps owes as much to intangible qualities as to the plants themselves. Without measuring, shapes emerged from the existing

Inspired in part by a walled garden, the perennial garden is more informal with billowing euphorbias and escaping foxgloves

volcanic ground, gifting Michael with a sense of their own being. Perhaps the most successful example of this was what the excavation of the house’s setting itself revealed: the underlying rock, which Michael has kept and enhanced to create a striking natural feature.

By looking at aerial photos, Michael recognised natural openings and closings in the inherited tree layout and traced systems of pathways and big bowls of planting within the existing trees. “My central passion is the idea of creating and manipulating spaces,” he says. “In this case simply through the judicious removal and retention of the existing trees, it was possible to create a garden that would buckle and fold within existing canopies.”

Even though the garden is in one of the coldest parts of Australia, with temperatures regularly falling below zero in winter but with warm to hot summers, the reasonable rainfall helped only by minimal summer irrigation, means that the plant choice has, according to Michael, proven to be “crazily successful”.

Instead of borders of perennials graded into heights, the visitor is engulfed in a raised undulating ground plane, varying from knee to chest height, where every plant becomes a pattern contribution rather than an ornamental individual plant. “Though occasionally being gently veiled by taller diaphanous grasses, your view over the space is never entirely blocked,” explains Michael. “So the eye skims over the surface of a tapestry of foliage and flowers.”

In the quarry garden, built at Sue’s suggestion on the site of an old quarry, Michael’s guiding planting principle has been to create a low, permanent matrix of evergreen plants that includes both grasses and herbaceous perennials. These mounds of varying degrees of crispness are then given a seasonal wash of colour from a succession of different bulbs. White anemones kick off the display in spring, followed by two species of tulip, purple dwarf irises, several different species of allium and a deep-blue flowering

In the quarry garden Michael has created a low, permanent matrix of evergreen plants given a seasonal wash of colour from a succession of different bulbs

cormous perennial Triteleia laxa in midsummer before these make way in late summer and early autumn for the arrival of colchicums and the beautiful white Lilium philippinense.

A final touch has been a Cornus controversa placed near the front door. “It was the clients’ choice, against my advice,” says Michael. “But it has succeeded in the way you would expect a tree that is silently invested in proving me wrong to succeed.”

Whether you consider this to be a European garden in an Australian setting, or an Australian garden that uses exotics is irrelevant. Stone Hill is a garden that works, informally, with what was already there.

Its designer has left his ego at home and chosen a planting design that enhances a magical sense of place.

USEFUL INFORMATION Find out more about Michael McCoy’s work at thegardenist.com.au

Left Michael was initially concerned about adding the three Yucca rostrata plants to the perennial garden but has since grown to love their steely solidity in the midst of the soft grasses and perennials. Their glaucous foliage combines subtly with the purple flowers of Penstemon ‘Blackbird’ and their exotic shape works well with the upright flowers of Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii.

Below in his design for the quarry garden, from where rocks for the local roads were quarried from the 1920s, Michael has aimed to acknowledge the site’s past use. Planting follows the existing contours of the rock faces and is never more than knee height so as not to obscure the rocks. Among this mix of low-growing plants are grasses, including the grass-like iron grass and carex, along with seasonal bulbs, succulents, and low-growing Euphorbia myrsinites and Euphorbia rigida.

Left The house, an award-winning modular concept by Melbourne-based design company Intermode, was built concurrently with the garden. It sits on a northwest-facing slope, overlooking a vast, mesmerising landscape. Rather than building a retaining wall, the rock face exposed in excavating the house site was pressure-hosed and left to create a natural ‘stairway’ where pools gather after the rains, and in spring Narcissus bulbocodium self-sow between the cracks. Below In the Oudolfian-style perennial garden, Michael has created islands of dense, perennial planting to form a waist-high, solid, undulating plateau that is punctured every now and then by plants that rise above it. Here, the beautiful golden heads of Stipa gigantea rise gracefully from the centre of the bed above the richly coloured purple Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’, offset by the fresh green of the switchgrass Panicum virgatum and honey-coloured spires of Digitalis ferruginea.

1 1 2 Many of the plants in this border, including Agastache ‘Sweet Lili’ ( 1) – a fabulously long-flowering, Australian-bred cultivar – and the grass Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’( 2), are emphatically vertical in form. If dense enough in flower, these tall plants can create a horizontal plateau of colour that can be punctured by something much taller, such as this centrally located Verbascum splendidum ( 3). In the foreground Penstemon ‘Blackbird’ ( 4), Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii ( 5) and Teucrium hircanicum ( 6) add to the vertical theme. The striking, glaucous Yucca rostrata ( 7) were added to this mix as an afterthought, but Michael now feels they provide a fabulous sense of stability and rigidity among all the other more ephemeral content. 3 In the perennial garden Michael created streams and pools of gravel that would push well back into the planting, allowing a very diffuse edge of plants, including what Michael considers the most beautiful of all grasses, Stipa gigantea ( 1), alongside soft, late-flowering perennials, such as Ceratostigma plumbaginoides ( 2) and vertical bursts of summer colour from Verbascum bombyciferum ( 3) and Kniphofia ‘Lime Glow’ ( 4). Planting has softened further over time by allowing a degree of managed self-sowing. One of the most enthusiastic self-sowers, and proving almost indestructible in the face of severe drought, is the fabulously vertical Digitalis ferruginea ( 5), here bolting to flower along with the rapidly rising flower-spikes of Stipa gigantea. 2 3 4 4 5 6 7 5

1 Michael’s original thought was to create a punctured plateau of colour and texture for the perennial garden. In this area the plateau is created by a horizontal bands of Phlomis fruticosa ( 1), Penstemon ‘Blackbird’ ( 2) and Panicum virgatum ( 3), punctured by the bolt upright flowers of Kniphofia ‘Lime Glow’ ( 4), Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’ ( 5), Verbascum bombyciferum ( 6) and Alcea rugosa ( 7). Michael is convinced that this balance between the density of the undulating plateau and those taller incidents that push through it is critical. As many of these vertical incidental plants self-seed, the balance is in a constant state of flux, which Michael finds delightful and frustrating in equal measures. 1 4 2 5 2 3 3 4 The quarry garden explores an entirely different planting approach to the perennial garden. In this area the ground is almost entirely covered with reasonably ‘self-grooming’ evergreen plants of widely varying texture, such as the blue grass Festuca glauca ‘Elijah Blue’ ( 1), the long-flowering spurge Euphorbia ‘Copton Ash’ ( 2) and the orange New Zealand sedge Carex testacea ( 3). Seasonal floral colour is then largely provided by a wash of bulbs across the entire space. The large number of each required meant that Michael used only those that were easily and reasonably cheaply available in large numbers, including the summer-flowering cormous perennial Triteleia laxa ( 4), which is preceded by species tulips and dwarf irises and then followed in late summer by colchicums. 6 7

In late summer the perennial garden becomes a rich tapestry of subtle colour. Deep-blue pools of the aptly named Caryopteris x clandonensis ‘Heavenly Blue’ create a strong contrast with the pale-pink of Hylotelephium ‘Matrona’, while the rich pink of Agastache ‘Sweet Lili’ contrasts subtly with the pale blue of Perovskia atriplicifolia.