Calwell, ACT

This garden designed by Landscape Architect and ANPS Canberra member, Leon Horsnell. The garden has been open to the public as part of Open Gardens Australia. It is a native garden with a skillful mix of local and commercial native plants with innovative landscaping hardware such as a water course that flows through the back garden down to a pool with water plants in floating ‘rocks’. The garden also has a native ‘lawn’.

The designer and the owner have have pooled their skills and desires to build and develop a native plant oasis within a suburb of increasingly exotic plants.

Leon calls this style of planting his 3D design, with vertical elements blended into the borrowed hill behind the house. All paving is on the diagonal and not intrusive to the eye. All rocks were handpicked and placed carefully to achieve this ‘natural’ effect.

For more information on this garden see Garden Design Study Group Newsletter 75, August 2011, p. 23