Category: Landscaping

Landscaping means planning and building all the non-plant elements in your garden. Stories cover the initial re-contouring of a site including surveying, excavating, contouring and terracing, mounding and channeling. There are also lots of stories about building and laying the hardscape elements of your garden, like paving, walls, retaining walls, pergolas and arbors, decks, chook houses, and water features. GardenDrum stories look at using a range of materials including stone, timber, concrete, metal, as well as some more unconventional materials.

Design Sandra Heggen Sustainability in garden design

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This is a subject that is very dear to my heart. I get quite passionate about the subject so do apologise if I offend any readers. I have been a sustainable garden advocate now for at least 20 years – well before most people even considered what sustainable gardens really meant. So I have put a lot of mental energy into working out why I think the way that I do about how we design gardens and how we manage them into the future. I was also the only owner/designer of a garden that was accredited with Ecotourism Australia for its sustainability credentials. Continue reading →

Bedford House Cemetery Belgium CGWC War and Peace

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On a day when all manner of people turned out to publicly and conspicuously commemorate ANZAC Day, marching, singing, praying, dressing up in uniform, waving flags, wearing medals, beating drums, playing trumpets, bagpipes and horns, then gathering noisily with family and regiment mates in watering-holes from Gallipoli to Goondiwindi to Greymouth, I dug deep to gather my thoughts of war and the fallen in my garden. Continue reading →

With my construction team at MIFGS 2013 Becoming a landscape designer

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Hi everyone, my name is Phil and this is my first entry for GardenDrum. I am a landscape designer and I love what I now do! That must reflect on people, as they already ask me “Why do you have so much energy?” The answer is “I love it!” It’s funny because if you ask me “How did you become a landscape designer?” the answer’s the same… Continue reading →

Dizzying geometric shapes (photo by Flexdream) The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

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For me gardening is taking time out of a ridiculously packed, never-ending schedule to relax and express yourself by creating an idea of how a garden paradise should look. Never hold back when it comes to your creative flair, and let go of the traditional gardening chains blocking your ideas from jumping out and biting the neighbours. Continue reading →

Bundanoon garden Solving garden design problems

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Is your garden very small? Long and thin? Big and overwhelming? Or perhaps you have problems with very sunny or shady parts in your garden, especially narrow walkways beside the house or dry shade areas under mature trees. Maybe your garden is just, well, plain boring! I talk with landscape designer Louise McDaid about solutions to many common garden design problems. Continue reading →

'Urban Sanctuary' Design Lee Bailey MIFGS Student Competition 2013 My Student Garden at MIFGS 2013

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Last June, Landscaping Victoria announced the brief for this year’s Student Design Competition at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show 2013 (MIFGS). The Country Fire Association was to be our ‘client’ and the theme we were to build was ‘Landscaping for Bushfire’. We were to adhere to the guidelines set out in the Landscaping for Bushfire manual which even helps us to work out what plants we are to include in our gardens. Our designs were to reflect a suburban garden allotment and from there we were free to do what we liked in our 6 x 6m space. “Fantastic”, I said to myself. Continue reading →

Phillip Withers at MIFGS 2013 Melbourne FS – who dared to be different?

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Last week’s Melbourne Flower Show was great fun but there were many similarities between most of the big display gardens. They were all very beautiful, very accomplished and very…..tasteful. As much as that’s lovely to look at, I did hanker after the days of Jenny Smith’s extraordinary 2008 homage to Martha Schwartz with its bizarre parade of painted tyres and gnomes, Rick Eckersley’s black and white garden or the very memorable “musk-sticks and burial mounds” (not my words) of Eco Concepts garden way back in 2004. Continue reading →

Witch Hazel and snow Spring says Hello in Yellow

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Here in the Northeast we were visited by another snow storm bringing our total since early February around 100 inches! Ninety something inches more than last year. But who’s counting? The news reports individuals who are angry with the Groundhog. Remember, this year the Groundhog predicted an early spring. Who can you trust? Continue reading →