NATURE STUDY

A welcome respite from hectic city life, this contemporary Australian bush garden complete with billabong was created by designer Phillip Johnson for a young Melbourne family.

- Jane Rowley

Many city dwellers face a similar dilemma: while work and family life bind them to the city, their hearts long for the restorative calm of a country retreat. For emergency doctor Carl Le and his wife, Maria Marshall, the solution was to bring the bush to their home in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell.

“We all look to our home as our sanctuary,” says Carl. “When I go to work, I see things that I would rather leave at work. So, stepping through our front gate, the idea is to leave it all behind and focus on the family and family life.”

The couple committed themselves to an 18-month renovation that involved moving the entire house to the south of the property and building a design where the home would wrap around a new and enlarged garden space. Entranced by Billabong Falls, a garden in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges, they commissioned its designer, Phillip Johnson, to create a thriving bush billabong on their city block.

Central to the design is the billabong, which takes the form of a chemical-free swimming pool. “The natural pool is the soul of this suburban backyard – it is the heart of this environment,” says Phillip. “It’s sustainable. It’s naturalistic. It’s very Australian and it’s about trying to reconnect people to the beauty of nature.”

At one end of the pool, water flows over an infinity edge, trickling down a rock wall into a filter zone planted with native rushes and margin plants. Designed to mimic a natural water system, the plants remove impurities from the water, which then passes through a filter formed by 13 tonnes of aggregate.