Gardening For Mountain Goats

Our writer delivers a progress report on the slow renewal of a neglected garden on a difficult sloping block

- Chloe Thomson

“The driveway is steep but you can turn at the top. Don’t stop halfway up or you’ll get stuck and, at the top, swing left to pull in front of the garage.” These are the instructions I give visitors to our home and garden.

Our north-facing quarter-acre block in the outer northeastern suburbs of Melbourne has a 33 per cent slope, roughly terraced into four main sections. We call it mountain-goat country.

When we bought the property six years ago, the “gardens” surrounding the 1980s home consisted only of towering gumtrees and a handful of poorly placed bottlebrushes. Areas of raised garden beds, which probably only came about when the house was built purely as necessary soil-retaining features, were positioned in a few spots close to the house itself.

These “garden beds” — some as tall as 2m — were, we discovered, filled halfway with builder’s rubble, topped with sandy soil, in turn capped with thick black builder’s plastic then a 30cm layer of red bark mulch (the nasty dyed variety). Needless to say, the soil in these beds was lifeless. It smelled very odd and didn’t contain a single living critter.

So we had dead soil, a relatively blank canvas and lots of steep sloping sections — this was going to be a big job! But my goal of doing it all ourselves and including as many vegetable gardens and fruit trees as possible is slowly coming together and, like all good gardens, it’s always growing and never really finished.

FRONT-YARD REVIVAL