Sunlight and Shade

For Retailer Margot Shannon, the garden she's nurtured for 30-odd years fills her with joy

- BY CHRISTINE REID

For their first wedding anniversary, Chris Shannon gifted his wife, Margot, an appointment with a landscape gardener. The pair had moved into the main house on the Shannon family property Talmo – a fourth-generation Merino wool farm located at Bookham, a village in New South Wales, Australia – when they were married in 1992, and the gardens were a blank canvas waiting for a fresh perspective. 'I think a garden makes a home,' says Margot. 'My father was a landscape contractor and I had always grown up with a big garden. When I moved here, it was so much hotter than Canberra, and the garden was small, with narrow beds and lots of concrete edges and paths. We wanted to establish a green haven around the house that would be an escape from the hot, dry paddocks.'