COME RAIN OR SHINE

It took two months of dedicated, daily work to transform an almost bare yard into this contemporary garden

- BRITTANY SMITH

There’s a sense of harmony that comes with perfectly balancing a series of contrasts and contradictions. For homeowners Tylah and Dylan, who work as a landscape architect and builder respectively, this was the challenge they faced when creating a garden from scratch and trying to infuse it with maturity, “Like it had always been there,” explains Tylah.

The husband and wife duo bought their Inner East Melbourne block in November 2020 but it wasn’t until three years later, when a renovation and total energy retrofit of the house was complete, that they finally got started on the garden. “There were no notable landscape features besides this beautiful golden elm tree out the back,” says Tylah.

The aged tree, with its sprawled canopy, formed the cornerstone of her creative vision. “It has quite a lime green leaf, so that was a key consideration of the whole garden’s design and colour palette,” she explains. “The other plants are either a darker green or silvery green to complement.” Seasonal planting was another important factor. Underneath the elm, hellebores blanket the ground. “They flower in winter, so when the tree is bare you’ve got this display of colour to the base,” says Tylah.