Sophie is at Aldgate in the Adelaide hills to visit the home and garden of Jamie McIlwain, a career landscaper who’s been in the game for over 30 years. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
So what does someone who works day-in-day-out creating beautiful gardens for other people do with their own garden? Across the roughly ½ acre site, Jamie has spent 15 years (and some blood, sweat and tears) creating a garden that is not only truly impressive in scale and function, but serves as a reference book to show clients exactly what can be achieved in their spaces, and what various features will look like.
Verge Garden and Entrance:
From the street you immediately know there’s some serious gardening going on here. A beautiful, soft, semi-formal meadow-style garden grabs the attention of any foot traffic.
The planting here is low-care species like sedums, salvias and Agastache that Jamie describes as “upright and pretty”. “It’s a soft colour tone of pinks and whites”. There’s also scattered trees to replace the pines, canny picks chosen for their highly ornamental nature; a ginkgo, a “crimson sentry” maple and a wychwood crabapple.
The entrance to the property is marked by a horticultural exclamation point. Grafted standard liquidambar (cultivar ‘Gumball’) provide visual contrast for an underplanting of various different-coloured cultivars of Buxus, tightly clipped into round balls.
“I clip them twice a year, and I spend a good 10 minutes on each one, but they still look good even when they’re fluffy”. He says structural plantings like this form the “backbone and year-round interest” in a garden, to be complimented by seasonal interest.
Perennial Plantings:
This theme of contrasting perennials with a structural element is continued into the garden proper. At the front of the house, it’s garden beds full of showy summer perennials contrasted with more tight hedging, roses and stonework.
Jamie loves his summer flowering perennials. “People should use them more; they don’t use much water and they’re very giving aesthetically. They come into their own once it heats up when other things are struggling”.
Jamie’s choices are Agastache 'Sangria' and ‘Blue Boa’, Echinops 'Taplow Blue' and various Sedum cultivars. They’re currently flowering and are complimented by larger ornamental grasses who Jamie says are essential to provide year-interest. Here Jamie’s pick is Miscanthus sinensis 'Sarabande' and Calamagrostis ‘Overdam’. “They hang onto their seed heads right into winter, and sometimes you’ll get a morning mist hanging onto them”.
Stonework:
One of the most striking features of the garden at the back of the house is the extent of detailed stonework throughout. Jamie says this was necessary to get the most out of the site, which was originally a steeply sloping lawn due to the Adelaide hills location. Stone retaining walls allowed for staggered garden beds, as well as steps and accessibility. “It’s making unusable spaces usable” says Jamie.
Local sandstone used for drystone-look reinforced walls, pavers, and gabion walls inside recycled mesh is “showing there’s different ways to use the same material”.
Sculpture:
Of course, no garden is complete without a bit of art, and Jamie was worked with a local sculptor to create metal structures that provide both visual interest and practical purpose. A grape vine is pruned to a metal espalier truss, complete with metal grape leaves and bunches of grapes.
Jamie was inspired by the “super tree” in Singapore and so commissioned his own version. A ‘Pierre de Ronsard’ rose climbs over it, and the structure itself bears steel leaves and roses, to fill in when the plant is dormant.
Engine Room:
The rear of the back garden is elevated out of sight from the house, and is what Jamie describes as “the engine room”. There a vegetable garden, compost bays and espalier fruit trees like figs, nashi pear and satsuma plum. One of the highlights is the impressive chook house, made from recycled timber.
Jamie’s hard work has created something that would be a dream garden for anyone and covers just about every base.
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