Rock on

For the longest time, garden trends focused on a palette of green and white, with little seasonal change. But in recent years, the ground has finally started to shift. By the time landscape architect Sophie Greive of Think Outside Gardens arrived at this Paddington garden, the owners had already settled on a palette of charcoal grey and soft pink. She was delighted.

“I was allowed to use some colour,” Grieve says. “Quite often I suggest things to clients and they get cut out along the way, but these clients went for everything with this job.”

As it turned out, soft pink was exactly what this garden needed. Although it faced north-east, it was dominated by a 4m high rock wall, which was then topped by a two-storey brick building. But where some may have seen obstacles, Grieve saw opportunities.

“When I first saw the wall I thought, ‘this is something really special’,” she says.

The house, particularly the kitchen, had already been updated but the L-shaped garden consisted almost entirely of grey tiles and box hedge. The clients, a family with young children, needed an outdoor space that would both entice and entertain, offering room for alfresco cooking and dining, as well as opportunities for play.

Given there was not a lot of space to work with, Greive devised a plan that would make use of every last centimetre. The house exterior was white punctuated by charcoal framing for the windows and doors, so Greive chose simple grey tiles outside to wrap around the entry points to the garden, creating easy access to the new dining space to one side and a pizza oven and egg barbecue to the other.

“People want to smoke meats and use pizza ovens outdoors now,” she says. “In South Africa they are called braais, where you cook over hot coals and wood. It’s a reflection of the local foodie culture, I think.”

Because there was not enough light coming into the corner of the garden to sustain a healthy lawn, Greive opted for a synthetic lawn on one side of the garden as a ‘no fuss’ alternative, and a cubby house on the other, accessed via stepping stones to create a sense of exploration for the kids. The stepping stones have been repeated along the side path with kidney weed growing between them.

“The architecture of the house is quite geometric so the garden needed something softer,” she says.

However, the real challenge was making the best of the spectacular natural rock without letting it overwhelm the garden. Grieve managed this with a combination of planting to draw the eye down, with a selection of trailing species as well as a row of cast-iron plants along the top ridge. At night, uplights at the base of the sandstone create a sense of drama.

She then painted the adjacent masonry wall a soft pink — Porter’s Paints English Rose — which both lightened the whole space and provided optimum contrast with the natural rock, and then planted it out with shrubs and trees in shades of silver, dark green and rust.

“I love how there is the light pink wall and then the dark rusty colour of the cercis,” Grieve says.

“You have to be prepared that in winter you might not see much in the garden because the trees lose their leaves, but often deciduous trees are the smallest and prettiest trees. With this garden, the neighbours have junipers as a strong backdrop so we had that borrowed landscape to work with, as well as that nice wall.”

Access to the garden was limited, but Greive was grateful that this terrace was only attached on one side.

“It helped with construction because it meant that we didn’t have to go through the house,” she says. “Often we take out fences where the house backs on to a laneway but we couldn’t do that here.”

To complete the experience, Grieve designed a deceptively simple scheme for the front garden, with box hedge and a potted cloud-pruned juniper with trailing dichondra as a statement plant. Large white cylindrical pots on the veranda filled with walking iris and rubber fig add much needed colour and shape variation. The small garden perfectly complements the front door. It’s painted pink, of course.

PADDINGTON TERRACE GARDEN

Design and construction: Think Outside Gardens

Photography: Anson Smart