Sowing the seed
Even when he’s off duty, Charlie Albone takes time out to smell – and deadhead – the roses. The Selling Houses Australia horticulture guru takes Tiffany Dunk on a tour of his prized family garden.
The importance of curb appeal is an oft discussed topic on Selling Houses Australia, the Lifestyle program which shot a then unknown landscape designer, Charlie Albone, to fame 11 years ago. So as we pull into the winding driveway of the Foxtel host’s home-away-from-home in Ourimbah on the NSW Central Coast, it’s shouldn’t have been a surprise to see the man himself with a leaf blower in hand, having just finished trimming the hedges ahead of The Weekly’s visit.
“Charlie comes up here and all he wants to do is go out in the garden which I find amazing because it’s what he does for work,” laughs his wife of eight years, Juliet Love. “But he decompresses out there and loves it. There is nothing I can do to get him inside. I do love the garden but I prefer to sit out there and have a glass of wine.”
“Juliet is always telling me, ‘Why don’t you get someone in to mow the lawns or help you out,’” Charlie, 37, shrugs in agreement. “But I enjoy it. What I love about gardening so much, I think, is the aspect of seeing something grow and nurturing it. We live such a fast-paced lifestyle where people expect stuff to happen so quickly. But if you can spend a bit of time nurturing and caring for things, it’s ultimately more rewarding.”
The expanse of the garden was a huge reason the Albones bought this three-bedroom home, set on an acre of land, originally intending it to be their permanent base. At the time, Juliet was pregnant with their first child Leo, now five (second son Hartford, three, arrived two years later) and, “We were looking for a place to nest, I guess,” she says of their decision to move away from the hustle and bustle of their work base in Sydney.
“Every window you look out from, you can see green. When we came to the first inspection here, I looked out onto the fields and thought, how lovely. The people who owned it at the time had sheep and I thought, how lovely for a little boy to grow up looking out the window and seeing that.”
The sheep were quickly joined by chickens, and swiftly thereafter a pair of donkeys and five alpacas.
“The Alpaca Street boys, we call them,” says Charlie of the herd of gangly, rubber-necked farm animals they saved after seeing an advert looking for a home for the mistreated creatures. “Sadly, two of them were very old so they passed away. But the other three seem pretty happy.”
Happy too are Leo and Hartford, who love working alongside their dad armed with mini tools, particularly in the veggie patch which provides well for the family dinner table.
“If they grow it themselves they’re more likely to eat it and try it,” says Charlie of the bonus of getting kids involved in the garden.“Because it’s not this weird thing
that turns up on the plate, they realise they’ve grown it and they’ve got a bit of pride in it.”
A royal invitation
Born in Hong Kong and raised in the UK, Charlie was a latecomer to gardening but once he arrived in Australia at the age of 18 he took it up wholeheartedly. Having landed a part-time job doing landscape maintenance, he realised he’d found his vocation. “I loved being outside and I loved the physical aspect of the work,” Charlie explains. “I started studying horticulture at TAFE because I needed a visa but also I was interested in it. I started my own business and two years later I got Selling Houses.”
And that show, now in its 12th season, gave him a platform to attend the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show in 2015 – and then again in 2016. The annual event, held in London each May and attended by royalty along with 157,000 ticketholding guests, is a garden lover’s dream.
To be invited to exhibit is an honour in itself.
But Charlie would make history when he won silver-gilt medals two years running, the first Australian designer to do so.
Exhibitors are given just 19 days to get their gardens up from scratch and ready for inspection by the green-thumbed hordes.
“I look back now and it was such a whirlwind because I’d only built one show garden before, in Sydney, and it was a completely different scale to being at the most prestigious show in the world,” he recalls. “I was really thrown into the deep end. But it was a lot of fun and the second year was also a great experience. Hopefully we’ll go again in 2020.”
His success at the event saw him rubbing shoulders with fellow horticulture lovers and passing on advice. One of those was The Duchess of Cambridge, who this year is designing a “Back to Nature”-themed exhibit for the show.
“She was there with Prince William and Prince Harry,” says Charlie of his meeting with the young royals in 2016. “Prince William and Catherine were talking about their own garden when I met them. Prince William was asking about what plant is this and what plant is that. Catherine told him, ‘Oh, we’ve got those in our garden.’ It was just that type of relationship conversation that people have, they’re just normal people. They were really nice.”
“Really nice” is a descriptor that also applies to the relationship between Charlie and Juliet. The pair met in 2009 when, hot on the heels of the success of Selling Houses, Charlie was offered another Foxtel show, The Party Garden.
Sponsored by Yates, the show would have Charlie working alongside an interior designer to transform gardens across Australia into places to hold the perfect outdoor celebration.
“What I love so much ... is seeing something grow and nurturing it.”
Originally, says Charlie, his Selling Houses co-host Shaynna Blaze was offered the design role. But after she turned it down, young interior stylist Juliet was put up for the plum gig – and for Charlie, it was love at first sight. “Shaynna takes credit for us getting together,” he laughs, adding that while several others were up for the job, he pushed for Juliet to get a screen test after spotting her photo.
“I’d never done any television before so I’d been trying to be all well prepared and rested and organised,” Juliet recalls of their early morning meeting.“But Charlie arrived and he’d been playing poker and drinking with his flatmates all night. He didn’t open his mouth the whole time!”
“I’d seen pictures of Juliet and I thought, you know, she’s far too attractive to have a conversation with me anyway so I’m just going to get drunk and if it all goes horribly wrong, I can blame it on the hangover,” Charlie explains. “And it didn’t go horribly, it went well.”
Love, actually
Very well indeed. The pair was engaged within 10 months, and married a mere six months after that.
And not long after, along came the house they are sitting in today and their first born, Leo. It was a dream pregnancy, recalls Juliet, who along with Charlie clearly relishes the joy that parenthood has brought their family. So when she fell pregnant with baby number two, she was shocked to find the experience vastly different.
“I felt really unwell for most of the pregnancy with Hartford, it was horrible,” she says. “I didn’t feel well,
I was really tired and I put it down to having to run around after a toddler. But then I started getting worse.”
Driving with Leo in the backseat one morning, Juliet was terrified when she was struck by a headache so bad she lost vision. Heading to the doctor, she was told she had likely developed gestational diabetes, a fairly common condition. But when the tests came back, it was far worse news.
“It was type 1 diabetes,” she says. “The consequences if you don’t manage it properly are dreadful – blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, all kinds of things. I had to go straight onto six insulin injects a day. So I’ve made it my mission since then to heal myself as much as possible through food and holistic health.”
Helping to do that, no doubt, is the bounty offered both in their own rural garden and that of their organic farmer neighbours.
For while their work schedules eventually made it impossible to stay here full-time (sadly, the sheep and the chickens had to move on, although the donkeys and alpacas are still in residence) every spare weekend and school holiday is spent making the drive from Sydney back to Ourimbah for some R&R along with the latest family addition, a Sharpei pooch called Fiona.
As Juliet puts it, “you come through the driveway, take a deep breath and immediately feel calmer.”