Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Where the Gardens meet the Bush

The late afternoon light picks out the sculpted landforms of The Hill Garden very clearly.  It is easy now to forget that The Hill Garden and the Courtyard are actually man made earthworks,  having been created since we did the first excavation for the Wine Cellar in May 1996.  It all seems to fit so naturally into the landscape that our landscaping interventions now go unnoticed.  That's a good thing.

The Hill Garden is intended to create a transition zone between the main gardens around the house and the untouched native bushland beyond.  In practical terms it serves as a firebreak and in aesthetic terms the line where "cultivation" ends and the "wilderness" begins is blurred by this garden. Form follows function.

This garden was inspired by the concepts of Wolfgang van Oehme and James van Sweden in their "new American Gardens" of the late twentieth century and the influential 1990 book "Bold Romantic Gardens" is here in our library. Following their inspiration we use grasses as a major visual component of The Hill GardenTake a look in the slideshow for photographs of grasses here at The Drip taken by Rick Martin.

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