GRAND DESIGNS

A TASMANIAN COUPLE REINVIGORATED THE SPRAWLING GARDEN OF THEIR HISTORIC FORMER RURAL PROPERTY.

A sprawling garden in Hobart follows an elegant palette of greens and whites, and is proving to be a lifetime work in progress for this Tasmanian couple.

FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, Angela and Clive Ockenden’s large garden in southern Tasmania has ebbed and flowed with the demands and rhythm of their family life. From initial plantings when they first returned to take over the 200-year-old family property where Clive was born, the one hectare or so of garden has been, in the way of living things, evolving and constantly changing. “It’s had its ups and downs and there were times within that 30 years when it looked great, and then things would happen and get in the way, our children were busy and we’d go off, and it would get dry and unruly again,” says Angela, a solicitor in a Hobart legal firm. “And then we’d start again. It’s probably only been in the last 10 years that we’ve really got into it again, and maintained it.” When Angela and Clive, an agriculturalist, first took over the property that had been in his family for three generations, there were only two established trees, a mulberry and a large ash. The main house, the original farmhouse dating from 1820, is the largest of three dwellings and, although they have an early photograph showing a carriage sweep, that had long since disappeared. “We wanted to enclose the front garden so it wasn’t all open,” Angela says. They began by planting trees around the perimeter of the garden — peppercorns, Schinus molle, viburnum, groups of birch, ash, ginkgo, magnolia, flowering cherries and weeping brooms, as well as numerous fruit trees that are all well established by now. Along the way there were inevitable challenges, as well as triumphs. “There were so many old pipes here, and one tap, but this soil is beautiful; you can grow an old boot in it because it was farmland and fertile, it’s flat and there are no challenges with banks.” Today, the garden makes a painterly setting, embracing their home and various outbuildings. It’s a lush and soothing palette of shades of green, blue, purple, white and the odd blush pink, with meandering beds shaded by multiple mature trees, and swathes of lawn. For Angela it’s been more about creating an overall ambience that suits the historic formerly rural property, rather than individual plants, features or design themes. “It’s mostly green and white, so you don’t get that colour jarring with loud colours,” she says. “I do have some pink things but I cut the heads off when they’re flowering. Most people who come here say it’s very peaceful.” Even after three decades Angela still regards it as a work in progress, but with their three children — two sons and one daughter — now adults, they have more time on their hands to edge the garden closer to how they want it to be. “We are at the stage where we want it to maintain itself, so we’ve changed a lot of plants, taken out a lot of the roses and put in grasses, and I’ve got nothing really special or delicate,” she says. “It is really just a landscape garden.” Yet it’s been time, or more realistically the lack of it, that has mostly influenced the development of this large garden and, indeed, has encouraged Angela’s practical and somewhat pragmatic approach to it. >

“I’m not really a gardener,” she somewhat surprisingly says. “I’m a bit ad hoc, but I like things to look nice and so I plant things that look good. If I don’t like it, I take it out. We’ve removed a lot of roses because they are hard to maintain, so now I’ve got olive trees, sage-type things, acanthus and artichokes and plants that don’t worry. It’s a grand-scale garden and if it’s neat it looks good.” If there is a standout feature, it surely must be the flag irises. “In spring they’re beautiful, and at one stage I tried to have a whole lot of different irises, but of course I didn’t look after them so they all reverted back to the old ones,” Angela says. “But that’s fine, I’m happy with them, and not too fussed about anything fancy. So, we have lots of irises...” In 2013 Catherine Shields, from Hobart landscape design company The Alchemy of Gardens, helped the Ockendens reinvigorate and bring a new layer of planting to the garden. “She helped me in various spots around the garden, in other aspects of the property and helped me formulate how it would work,” Angela adds. “She introduced me to grasses and we have planted lots of them.” Over the three years that Catherine worked with them, they removed plants in decline or not in keeping with the look they wanted — in particular golden diosma — and concentrated on planting more evergreen shrubs and ground covers and thickening the boundary plantings for privacy. “It was already a lovely garden with old trees and winding paths connecting open lawn areas,” says Catherine. “We were aiming for an old English style with woodland glades around the lawns and under the shade trees.” Catherine added a sandstone seating wall and paving, more box hedges, grasses to replace agapanthus in the front garden and, in other areas, shrubs, perennials and grasses, including Stipa gigantea, Calamagrostis acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, Deschampsia cespitosa and Helictotrichon sempervirens, in “a loose rural style”. “The grasses are a great link between a more contemporary feeling and rural meadow styles,” says Catherine. “It is a unique place — entering the gates is to enter an enclave of otherworldliness — and it was important to retain the feeling generated by the architecture and the existing old trees and planting.” As it has for decades, this serene living canvas will no doubt continue to evolve in tune with Angela and Clive’s busy lives — and sometimes it will be more naturally than by design. “It will change with what survives and what doesn’t,” Angela says. “I don’t really buy plants now — apart from a splurge every now and again.” Even so, they share the lament of many that there’s rarely time to sit and appreciate what they’ve created. “It’s only since the children have moved away that we’ve been able to spend more time doing things in the garden,” Angela says. “Clive is excellent as the workhorse when we’re pottering around the place on weekends.” She adds, “I don’t know that you ever relax in the garden. We’ve got lots of places to sit, but I don’t think I’ve ever sat in them!” For information about The Alchemy of Gardens, call 0419 647 070, or visit thealchemyofgardens.com