Garden Profile: All Points South

A bewitching garden nestled into the nsw south coast hinterland has spaces to enjoy every day of the year.

- Jane Parbury

THE GARDEN OF JAN AND ROD’S NSW SOUTH COAST HOME looks so entirely at one with the lovely 1850s weatherboard cottage that sits within it that you could be forgiven for thinking its structure and form were of a similar vintage. Details such as the horseshoe-shaped lawns; wide, luxuriant garden beds; neatly clipped box edging deep herbaceous borders; and giant Illawarra figs that date from well before the land around them was cleared for farming, all conspire to lend the verdant expanses an air of venerability, reinforcing that first impression.

Yet much of the garden – save for the figs, a couple of stately Norfolk pines and a smattering of remnant perennials – is decades younger, planted only when Jan and Rod moved to the area from the Central Coast, back in 2002. “It was quite a bit different to this,” remembers Jan. “There were a lot of roses, and we didn’t really have an orchard. We’ve changed all the beds around the house, and put a lot of topiaries in.”

The couple asked gardener Michael Cooke to help redesign their new surrounds, bringing him on board soon after their move. “We thought we would get the garden established before we did any renovations to the house,” says Jan, who has since added an extension to the cottage. Rather than a traditionally loose, whimsical style, the areas have a defined structure. “I’m not really a lover of cottage gardens, so we have formality with a little bit of ‘cottage-y garden’ between,” Jan says.

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