A children’s garden built for adventure

A young family needed a garden where their posse of adventurous young boys could play and explore.

THE BRIEF

Any garden created on this steeply sloping block needed to engage three boisterous young boys and be largely maintenance-free – this family had their hands full keeping up with their children. The family loved a tropical native tree that was already in the garden and wanted to give their neighbours over the back fence a bit of privacy as their second-storey overlooked the property. The angular house extensions sat awkwardly in the landscape and the house badly needed some shading from the blistering heat on hot Summer days. The family had dreamed of having a productive garden but knew they were too time-strapped to care for traditional fruit trees that needed pruning.

THE DESIGN

Taking cues from the plants the family loved, we designed a low-maintenance Native Rainforest full of flower, scent and culinary plants that gave the garden a sense of lush enclosure and privacy, and shaded the house from the hot Summer sun. No pruning required.

An important part of the brief involved engaging the boys. On this steep block, we turned to water. Ponds and billabongs are fantastic for children – this is Nature Play at its best – with a fascinating array of plant and aquatic life including fish, frogs and tadpoles, lizards and dragonflies. We turned the entire front garden into a large billabong that could only be crossed by stepping stones – home to frogs, aquatic plants, water snails and a solar fountain fed by rainwater from the house roof. The billabong fed into a dry creek bed that ran down the side of the house and collected into a lake at the bottom of the garden with its own jetty, sandy beach, fire pit for cookouts and benches for conversing, day dreaming or gazing at the stars.

Rainwater collected from the enormous roof area – 26,000L – was more than enough for the entire household and garden. This was stored in bladders under the new wraparound timber deck, which was built as a series of billowing curves to create a more rounded feeling to the property, giving it a less angular feel and allowing it to sit in the landscape more organically.

The steeply sloping back garden was terraced to create a series of functional areas – the space outside the house for lazy breakfasts at the weekend and entertaining on the deck – the middle terrace with open areas for playing covered in long soft native Wallaby Grass (Austrodanthonia racemosa), while the bottom terrace was reserved for the lake, which was stocked with fish, water snails and a different suite of aquatic plants from the front garden. A zip line from the house above landed the boys safely on to a sandy beach. Nearby, a fire pit with comfortable benches was ideal for cookouts on warm summer nights.

The dry creek bed was planted with elegant native Knobby Club-Rush (Ficinia nodosa) and and ran from the top billabong to the lake below, flowing down each terrace, creating waterfalls during heavy rainfall.

Benches around the garden beneath shady trees created places to stop and rest, read and reset.

The edible Native Rainforest provided habitat for wildlife, especially native birds, while tall perimeter trees gave a sense of enclosure and privacy. We added shady eaves around the house and deck with deciduous vines to screen the harsh summer sun and allow winter sun, ensuring the hot west-facing sides of the house was shaded and cool during summer. The Native Rainforest trees provided tea, nuts, spices, fruit and flowers, thanks to a wide variety of trees including Macadamia (Macadamia tetraphylla), Lemon Myrtle (Backhousia citriodora), Mountain Pepper (Tasmannia lanceolata), the native citrus White Aspen (Acronychia oblongifolia) and Native Tamarind (Diploglottis australis). And, needless to say, no pruning needed.

Creating a true low-maintenance garden meant replacing all existing lawn – which had turned to bare muddy patches in Winter – with native grass in some areas while in other areas, including the driveway, with granitic sand set with sunken pier timbers. Keeping the site free of hard paving meant the dry creek bed could function like a rain garden with all rain falling on the site able to penetrate the soil, adding to the lushness and ongoing low-cost of the garden.

The rear wraparound porch, the front porch and the driveway pier timbers were all hard-wearing Ironbark timber that were left to weather to a soft silvery grey amid the golden granitic sand and handsome tan and rust mudstone.

The result was a lush, private garden full of different areas that could provide spaces for the adults to relax and entertain with plenty of areas for the boys to play, explore and have adventures in – spaces that could grow with the young family.