GARDENS OF THE COAST A beach-side chic garden

HAPPENINGS ON THE COAST

A BEACH-SIDE CHIC GARDEN

Toowoon Bay

Everyone loves a beach house. But not everyone loves the challenge of gardening by the sea. This sumptuous but deceptively simple garden is the result of a marriage of two minds – that of a keen gardener who loves the tropical look and a landscape designer with an eye for design and restrained planting.

WORDS PAUL URQUHART PHOTOS LISA HAYMES

Outdoor spaces are an integral part of mid-century style and bold foliage plants are enhanced by the simple black-and-white-striped awning.

The front deck is screened from the front and will be even more private once the small Brazilian cloak next to the bird bath grows.

Fijian fire plants are a good screen in a salty coastal scene and their bold shapes and colours deserve to be more commonly grown along our coast.

Bill and Margie McLean bought an older house back in 2015, renovated it and wanted a garden to match. Both loved tropical designs, but wanted a garden that would not tie them down. The place to go for tropical plants on the coast is Impact Plants at Empire Bay and the owner, Paul Anderson, recommended Brendan Lewis, of Brendan Lewis Landscapes.

Brendan’s plan is refined but simple, restricting plant variety in keeping with the best principles of mid-century modern design style. It provides some great lessons in how to develop a coastal garden.

WHAT IS A MID-CENTURY MODERN LANDSCAPE?

After the chaos of the 1940s, people craved order and structure in their home environment. Mid-century modern came as a response to a world that was chaotic and threatening, something that we can, once again, relate to. A major element is the connection between indoor and outdoor spaces, clean lines, often linear design with bold graphic shapes and clipped foliage and repeated plantings.

ANALYSING THE LOOK

Brendan’s plan uses very few plants but each is selected for its form and foliage texture repeated in various ways. For instance, along the garage wall, Fijian fire plants, a popular shrub from the 50s are aligned as an informal hedge but interspersed with dracaena and frangipani to give added height. Along the drive and against the neighbour’s building, more dracaenas plus traveller’s palms almost completely cover the wall. There’s variety here as different foliage forms and species are used to unify the whole garden.

To hide the rear areas, a hedge of hibiscus adds some muchloved colour, but stays within the structured nature of most of the shrub borders. The front garden is enclosed by a row of densely planted variegated schefflera.

Lawn is a key element, adding voids and negative spaces. Bill’s choice of Queensland blue couch, which thrives in the coastal conditions, is the perfect foil for driveway and shrub borders.

PLANTS

What we sometimes think of as forgotten or retro plants are a feature of this garden and they show that, when grown well, they can be a true highlight of a coastal garden. Some have fallen from favour, but here they show just how good they can be.

• Dwarf umbrella tree (Scheffera arboricola ‘Variegata’) from Taiwan is related to the once common native from

Queensland, S. actinophylla, but much better behaved.

Shrubby in form and easy to prune to shape it features beautiful orange berries in the summer, loved by lorikeets and wattle birds. • Fijian fire plant (Acalypha wilkesiana) comes in a range of leaf shapes and colours. The cream and green form is most likely

‘Tahitian Gold’, but other more compact growing forms with red leaves include ‘Inferno” and ‘Firestorm’. They’re best kept shapely by regular light pruning in spring, and grow well in salty conditions. • Ixora chinensis ‘Prince of Orange’ comes from tropical China.

But this improved form is compact, colourful and easy to grow. Great balls of fiery orange and handsome foliage also grow in pots, too, so could be a useful plant for apartment balconies. Give it humus-rich soil and regular watering and it will flower most of the year. • Traveller’s palm (Ravenala madagascariensis) looks like a giant strelitzia or bird of paradise and needs room. Here it’s kept to a single trunk where the huge leaves against the beige background of the neighbour’s wall show it off to perfection. • Frangipani is everyone’s favourite iconic tropical tree and it thrives in sandy coastal soils. Not so slow-growing, it responds well to fertiliser, compost and water. But don’t overdo it or the branches may become heavy, brittle and waterlogged and susceptible to snapping in strong winds • Pandanus or screw pine (Pandanus tectorius) is a subtropical plant that grows as far south as Port Macquarie and is considered a quintessential coastal tree. Fairly slow growing, they make a bold statement in a coastal context.

For more information, contact Brendan Lewis, of Brendan Lewis Landscapes: brendalewis5@bigpond.com or 0409 122 269