Home Gardens & Garden Design

What makes a great garden?

I have traveled between Canada and Australia a lot over the years. A love of photography and gardens led me to explore different neighborhoods and photograph gardens along the way. Photographing details of home gardens and those created by landscape designers in Melbourne, Canada, and Europe – See the grand garden tour Europe here

Broadly speaking landscape designers may have the luxury of objectivity and experience. Working to a brief and a budget with a degree of emotional detachment can be a good thing. There are some incredibly skilled home gardeners making very well-planned gardens. But at the other end of the spectrum, home gardens are often not planned at all.

Many home gardens are put together piece by piece with no clear overview and without a landscape plan. Although you may get a totally different results when engaging landscape designers. This lack of planning and experience can often have unexpected, quirky, and charming results.

Climate, availability of materials, and plants lead to very different results in different countries. Our slightly boring paling fence is a great example of this. Why in Melbourne do we almost always build our fences from the same materials in the same way? I love traveling and observing these garden details in other countries. It can be a refreshing way to rethink the simplest garden elements and to inform my own design work.