Remote Seaside Gardening

When we moved to our house, I pondered the weedy, sandy front garden. I knew I wanted native Australian plants, no lawn and parking for two cars. It's a small space so that meant the right half the garden would be bare driveway, which I thought would look bleak and unbalanced.

One evening I sat on the porch listening to the masked lapwings, smelling the dry grass smell of the dead weed lawn and another smell too...the sea! We're about 6 km from the coast but the breeze comes through on summer evenings. These sensory cues were the breakthough for the seaside garden design.

Indigenous plants are plants that are native to the local area. This should mean they are ideally suited to local conditions, urban landscape and climate change notwithstanding. There's very little remnant vegetation in our area, so the nearest indigenous nursery is actually much nearer the sea, at the Bayside Community Nursery. Although they're not strictly indigenous to our area, seaside plants suit our sandy soil. The quality of the plants progagated at this nursery is outstanding, and tubestock costs around AU$1.30.

Our initial plantings cost around AU$40 and filled the entire garden. For another AU$100 we covered the surfaces with 14 cubic metres of waste mulch from a local tree felling service. In spring the magpies bring their babies to hunt for worms in the mulch and to practice their warbling.

It's taken a few years but the plants are now above head height. There are plenty of pathways and hiding places for the Bug and Maisy Brown, and a concealed clearing for the deck chairs. I've replaced a few plants that didn't thrive, and put in some more advanced trees from the Bayside Nursery along the fence where they need to compete with the tree privet, an invasive weed in the neighbour's garden.

The next phase will be to cover the surfaces with sandy-looking decomposed granite, a permeable surface which is suitable for paths and driveways but also lets the water soak through into the soil. Visually this should integrate the driveway with the garden, so that we don't just have a great slab of concrete on one side. A weeping sheoak, Allocasuarina verticillata, will hang over the driveway, and perhaps we will have a shade sail for the car. The open area of the driveway is balanced on the other side of the garden by a circular clearing in the planting, which has deckchairs and may one day be a petanque court!

The garden style was inspired by Jane Burke's "Offshore" garden and her neighbour Fiona Brockhoff's "Karkalla" garden in Sorrento, Victoria.