Apr
Hi, I’m Jan Hogarth from PlaceMate Architects. And today I’m talking with Johanna MacMinn, who’s a landscape architect who we collaborate with. Hello, Johanna.
Hello, Jan, thanks for having me. I am a landscape architect and I focus on residential garden design.
Today, we’re just gonna give you the absolute basics. If you are starting out on a property that you’ve got your home and you’re thinking of doing some work on the garden and possibly some future renovations, where do you even start with this process? What’s the basics and how do you get cracking? What order do you tackle things in? Joanna?
Well, first off, you need a plan. You cannot do anything without a plan. You need to know where you’re headed. Even if you’re not headed there right away, you just need to know where you’re going. So…
– Where do you start? When you come onto a site, what are the absolute first basics that you have to look at?
– I look at my arrival experience when I walk up to a new home. And what does that house look like? How do I find that front door? What’s the access like? What does it look like? And so, I guess that is my first experience of the house and that’s gonna be everyone’s first experience.
– So that’s really street appeal.
– Absolutely.
– So we know, ask any real estate agent, what’s the best way that you can create some value in your house? Street appeal, you make it look nice from the front of the street.
– Absolutely. And then also, how do you move through that space? You’ve arrived at the front door, that’s great, but I have to walk by the bins and I had to-
– So you hide all your service stuffs?
– Yes, you disguise it as best… But it also has to be still practical. You still have to be able to get those bins out every week. You have to be able to get from your kitchen into those bins, for instance.
– So there’s bins, air conditioning, clothes-
– All the ugly stuff.
– Dog yards, stuff like that. But if you’re starting on it, you just plan that from the beginning.
– You think about all the boring stuff first and then you can move on to the prettier stuff.
– Okay. Now, what about the site and your neighbours?
– Well, how do you feel in that space? There’ll be all sorts of things that… You might be looking out the windows at really ugly fences. You might have a big block of units next to you, overlooking into your garden. All of those, that’s still the sort of the practical stuff, but you need to think about privacy, about hiding those fences, and also about who’s gonna be using the space. Do you have children? Do you have pets? Do you want to entertain in the garden? So you start sort of analyzing those issues, maybe even making a, “I must have list” and a, “I really love to have list,” and weighing it up, talking to your family, all the people that are gonna be using that garden and how you wanna use it. And that’s where you start. Then you can-
– Work from the plan.
– Work from the plan and start addressing those really important issues, but also the, how does that garden work.
– Now, when you’re starting with this, what elements in the garden do you place first? Do you start with the flowers?
– No, that’s just the pretty stuff you add at the end
– End. So you start with the hard landscaping?
– Absolutely.
– And what is that?
– The hard landscape escaping might be your pathway to your front door. It would be your service area, how are you gonna access around the side of the house, with ease. How are you gonna get the lawnmower around. Those sort of things. How are you gonna drive up to your house? So obviously-
– So why is it called hard landscaping?
– It’s the harder stuff.
– You mean it’s like the path. Right, okay. So it’s the stuff that’s actually built and what’s-
– The expensive stuff. The retaining walls and all that.
– So you can’t come back and do it later on, it gets locked in?
– Well, then you get stuck with what-
– Whatever bad decision you make-
– Really important to put a lot of thought into those connections. And also having that connect to the inside of the house, and so the home, you walk in through your front gate, assuming you’ve got a gate, but onto your property, and that garden is just very much a part of your home and it’s all…
– Okay.
– It all flows.
– But you thought… So like you’ve done this one, you thought about the gate house and the path, and then you came… I mean, you would’ve had it as an overall vision, but you had this is the first thing that has to be placed and then you can massage the planting around it.
– Absolutely.
– Okay.
– Yeah, planting comes last, yes.
– Right, so that soft landscaping. Here’s a classic hard landscaping-
– This has a lot of issues that I often encounter.
– So just quickly, Fence?
– We’ve got a fence that’s being brought to your forefront of your vision because of the color of it and because you’ve got no planting around it. So the first thing we did was just paint that fence out just a darker color so it retreats and then we didn’t really need all of this hard landscaping and a little bit of AstroTurf and this tiny little garden bed in the corner, so we ripped it all out, and we still needed pathways and connectivity, but we made it all about the garden. So that garden is now integrated into the home, it’s just a little townhouse. And eventually this tree will grow up and it’ll offer privacy, but in the meantime, we’ve got an umbrella that we can use to… I’m sure if I went back and took a picture of that today, that was probably about three months ago, that tree will already be providing shade and privacy for my client.
– There’s a retaining wall, that’s your hard landscaping, and your soft landscaping is the garden area there too.
– That’s right. And in this garden we we’re thinking about lawn for the children to run around on, but that retaining wall didn’t need to be straight across, so that’s where the creativity and the flare came through and the design, but it was one of the practical elements that we had to address and to create a family garden with a bit of interest. Existing tree that we were able to put a swing in for the little girls. And then this garden simply is planting. It was a planting plant I was invited to do for a client. And it’s just a pathway that you can walk through the garden and then enjoy. But this is just incorporating beautiful soil into… The garden, the soil was a bit iffy and things were stunted and not growing properly. And this was six months after it’s planted and it is thriving.
– And the other thing is, if you’re looking at this photo, you can just about barely make out where the neighbors are, so it’s created a whole other world at the back of the house. But the point of it is, there was a plan you worked out, there’s your hard landscaping, it’s just a path, and then the soft plan, you do-
– Which was existing. And you don’t always have to start from scratch.
– Well, there you go.
– You can play with what you have and say, “Well, can’t afford to replace that. How are we going to… I can’t afford a patio, but I wanna sit in the garden.” You can just put some lawn down, honestly, and create those spaces and even just… We’ve got a garden setting in the grass and a place that invites you into the garden.
– Okay, so first you’ve done your plan, you put in your hard landscaping, you’ve put in your soft landscaping, and you might do something special. And I think you call this sparkle.
– I do. It’s those finishing touches that are on your, “I would love list.” Once you’ve gotten your must-haves, what is gonna make that garden a place that you and your family wanna enjoy? And this is a front garden. So we’ve dealt with the practical, the arrival experience. You can’t see it in this photo so much, but there’s a pathway that leads you to the front door. Very practical, gets you from point A, arrival, to point B, walking into the home. And then we had some other issues that we… Or not issues, we had some other wants that my client had. She wanted a place for her kids to be able to enjoy the trampoline and also for them to sit there. You can’t see this, there’s a place here where the parents can sit and watch their children-
– And they’ve got a fire pit.
– Now look, this-
– You can have a fire… This is a pretty fancy fire pit, but you could make it a lot simpler and it would still be great.
– Absolutely. It could be a couple of chairs around a Bunnings fire pit, but it’s a place to gather and a place to be in that garden. So that’s the sparkle. It might be a feature pot in front of a window that you see that just looks gorgeous that’s gonna grab your eye and really make you happy. I mean, that’s what a garden should do.
– Bird bath, because you like birds.
– You like birds, and you make that your focal point.
– So the takeaways are, first, before you’re gonna do your landscaping, you do a plan.
– Absolutely.
– If you need help, you can always get a consultant in, but you can do it yourself by being strategic about the way you are using it. Second, then you place the hard elements in your house because you only get one chance to do that right. Would that be right?
– Well that’s your expensive outweigh. You’ve gotta think-
– And then you do put your plants in. But I’m guessing if you’re going to do your plants, would you do the big plants first, the long-term plants?
– Absolutely. If you do have a limited budget, think about the plants that need to go in right away and that those would be, maybe it’s a tree for privacy or for shade.
– Hedges.
– Hedges, for privacy. And just think about those that can go in, even small, as long as you’ve put the money and time into preparing the soil
– In our climate-
– It get away-
– Yeah, it will grow anyway.
– Things are growing so fast. Honestly, this garden was planted in, I’m thinking it was October, it was ridiculous.
– So about six months later.
– Six months later-
– Amazing.
– And it already looks like this. In another year, it’ll be-
– And from a value proposition, in 10 years time, it’s gonna look still look amazing.
– Absolutely.
– So when you’re thinking about this property, being strategic about the way that you tackle the property-
– And you have to think about our climate. How do we use these spaces? We spend so much time outside, we really have to think about these as outdoor-
– Outdoor rooms.
– An extension of our home. So think about the shade. I don’t if I’m gonna be in my garden, I need to be comfortable.
– But the other thing is, if you’ve bought the property, then you’ve got a house and a block of land. If you can get outdoor rooms like this, it saves you having to build another room, so you can actually get full functionality out of your entire property, and that’s a really sensible value proposition for your home. So Joanna, thank you very much for this insight into designing for gardens and helping people get the best value out of their property. Where can they find you?
– Thanks Jan, thanks for having me. You can find me at myverandah.com.au, or also on Instagram under My Veranda as well.
– And you can look at all your pictures there?
– That’s right.
– Thank you very much.
