COMPANION PLANTING
Australian House & Garden Magazine|February 2020
As this garden took shape, so too a strong friendship grew between the property’s keen-to-learn owner and the landscape designer she entrusted with it.
Elizabeth Wilson
COMPANION PLANTING

Kaye Strain loves pottering in her garden, secateurs in hand. “I’m having so much fun,” she says. “I’m so happy I discovered gardening.” She’s serious about her new-found passion, a pursuit inspired by the recent revamp of her garden by Richard Unsworth, director of plant emporium Garden Life.

The garden is on a rocky, sloping site at Palm Beach, on the northern-most tip of Sydney’s Northern Beaches peninsula. Perched on a hillside, with views of the Pacific Ocean, the property is south-east facing with poor sandy soils, exposure to southerly winds and a 10-metre incline from the street to the front door. Not ideal conditions for garden-making, but despite that – or thanks to it – Richard has created a textured, thriving wonderland that sits seamlessly in the landscape.

Kaye bought the property in 1993, drawn by the water views and the original 1950s-era weatherboard home nestled into the bush. Early on, she enlisted a local stonemason who terraced the garden, using bush rock from the site. She then engaged designer Annie Wilkes, who filled the terraces with a plumbago, agapanthus, olives and pencil pines. It was a low maintenance, non-gardener’s garden that suited Kaye perfectly at the time, as she was working long hours in a demanding job.

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