Olive green

One of the great pleasures of international travel is that feeling of being immersed in your environment. It may be sitting at a café in Paris watching the world go by, enjoying an alfresco lunch under the grape vines in Tuscany, or relaxing poolside at a Balinese resort. 

The desire to ‘bottle’ that experience to recreate it at home is understandable. Get it right and you’ll be able to relive the moment on a daily basis. Get it wrong and you risk creating a pastiche of everything you loved about your travels.

The owners of this Paddington garden had their hearts set on creating an outdoor dining and living space that embodied the spirit of the Italian alfresco lifestyle. 

Landscape design consultant at Secret Gardens, Mark Curtis, says the plan was to make the space large enough for a dining table and separate outdoor lounge while updating the materials used. With an area little more than 5m wide to work with, there was not an abundance of space.

“It was a typical rundown Paddington garden from the 80s,” says Curtis. “It suffered from really bad proportions, overgrown plants and dated materials like low brick retaining walls and cement pavers. There was also a huge camellia tree that dominated the space and made it quite dark and restricted.”

Curtis tackled the sense of overwhelming darkness, created by the overgrown plants, in several ways. The first stage was to push back the planting scheme to reveal more of the usable space. This meant the camellia was the first thing to go. 

In keeping with the owner’s desire for a European theme to the garden, Curtis took her to a landscaping supplier at Peats Ridge to select a mature olive tree, which are traditionally slow growers, to provide the main focal point in the garden.

“She really enjoyed being part of the process,” he says.

After some discussion with the owners, Curtis decided to retain a small row of mature magnolias along one boundary line, though he gave them a hard prune to open up the space. He then added cloud-pruned conifers for a little more European flair, with ground covers for the understorey to be enjoyed at eye level when sitting, while maintaining the sense of openness in the garden.

“People might be drawn to a shrub with more volume but a ground cover will give you the illusion of more space,” Curtis says. “With the area under the olive tree, if we had planted that out with more volume, it would have shrunk that space.”

Instead of bulky masonry retaining walls, the Secret Gardens team inserted a curved steel blade retaining wall, which was custom-made by a metal fabricator. In such a small space, detail is everything, so Curtis worked with the builder, who was in the final stages of renovating the house, to ensure clean finishes between materials. 

“The steel edge took some time to get right with our metal fabricator but the builder needed to know so that the concrete slab finished just where the radial arc began,” he says.

The angles of the newly finished architecture have been balanced out by softer plantings of Japanese and Chinese star jasmine behind the low retaining walls and under the olive tree, as well as catmint under a Gertrude Jekyll climbing rose that one of the owners requested. Along with natural stone pavers, it lends the space a relaxed feel in keeping with the Mediterranean aesthetic.

“If the architecture is strong, you shouldn’t feel the need to introduce more structure through the plants,” says Curtis. “The key is to provide that softness so that the material content fades away and you are left with more of a garden impression. If we had put more Buxus in, it would have strengthened the materials further.”

The sleight-of-hand design has made a small space feel much larger, allowing enough room for woven lounge furniture from Eco Outdoor, a larger metal dining setting by Hay from Cult, as well as a café-style table for two in a breakout space under the olive tree. 

Best of all, it has captured the essence of the Mediterranean attitude to life where food, family and friends are key to a life well lived.

MEDITERRANEAN GARDEN

Landscape Design: Secret Gardens

Photography: Nicholas Watt