I'm here to see Jamie McIlwain,
who's just a short 15-minute drive away from my place.
I've heard a lot about how amazing this garden is,
so I'm really excited to finally be here to see it for myself.
Jamie is a landscape designer
who's been creating beautiful gardens in Melbourne and Adelaide
for the past 30 years.
But in between, he has also managed to find time to work on his own place
in Aldgate, up in the Adelaide Hills.
This garden isn't quite designed as a normal home garden.
It's really designed to be more of a reference book or a look book
for your clients, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Sometimes when you present a client with a design
and they just can't quite grasp what you're trying to present to them,
I bring them here, I show them something and they go,
"I get it. I see what you're trying to do."
So, yeah, they can live it and see it and feel it and touch it.
It helps me tailor the garden that I'm building for them to them.
How long have you been on this property?
I've been here since 2003.
So, the garden's evolved over the years.
You know, I look at certain steps and think,
"Remember that Easter or that Christmas
"or that long weekend where I did this and that?"
I mean, I have had a lot of help
from other contractors and my own staff.
It's taken probably 15 years to get to where we are now.
Let's start at the verge and the entrance
to get an introductory sense of how Jamie has approached his garden.
I've designed this sort of...
..you might call it a cottage/prairie style garden.
Beautiful. Very upright plants.
Now, what are the trees? This looks like a crabapple.
It is. This is one of my favourites.
This one is 'Wychwood Ruby',
so it came out of the beautiful Wychwood Gardens
in northern parts of Tasmania.
It's a great small, little vase-shaped tree.
And then you've got one of the crimson maples?
Yeah - just a pop of colour
to contrast against this sea of green.
I didn't want trees that were gonna create too much shade
for what we've got down here.
They look like hardy perennials. Relatively low maintenance.
Absolutely, yes.
So this is almost a set-and-forget garden.
I mean, I come through with the hedge trimmer in winter
and cut everything down very unceremoniously.
They get a very occasional water.
They get watered in, but they pretty much fend for themselves.
And pumpkins growing throughout.
I thought it's just waste to not put them in.
They take up so much room,
so they're allowed to ramble down the side here.
So, yeah, it's great. We get about 40 or 50 a year.
That would keep you in pumpkins for the year.
It does, it certainly does.
That's just the beginning,
because the front garden is packed with even more plants and ideas.
I bet everyone that wanders down the street
is impressed by how perfectly trimmed everything is.
Yeah, well, it's a contrast to the perennials,
and having the gumballs and the sphered buxus
work well as a backbone part of the garden -
the plantings of the garden, at least.
So how much work goes into keeping them so neat?
Not that much. I prune them twice a year.
And they take 7-10 minutes per plant.
And I do about...I don't know, 10 a day.
OK.
But it's the contrast that works so well.
So, the looseness of the perennials, you obviously love perennials.
Yeah. I think perennials are fabulous for a lot of reasons.
One would be the aesthetics.
They're beautiful plants. They're very giving.
They flower a lot.
Secondly, all the insects, the bees, the birds, the honeyeaters,
they love them,
so you're just gonna attract the birds in, the noises that they make.
And with the beneficials come less pest and disease issues,
so it just goes on and on.
And, actually, they're enhanced
by the neat lines not only of the clipped box
but the stone walling.
Having the perennials is great, but you need to pare them down
and give them some structure and some order,
and then they really can do their thing.
And that's what the walls and the hedges and the spheres do
in that regard.
If someone's never tried perennials in their garden before,
have you got any recommendations?
I'd most certainly suggest salvias as a start.
You can get the small varieties and some taller ones.
They're very tough and they flower for a very long time,
so they're good bang for your buck.
There's a beautiful agastache at the back.
That's 'Sangria'. Mm-hm.
That's a plant that flowers for a very long time.
I mean, the coneflowers themselves, the echinacea, are fabulous too.
And you've also got a number of ornamental grasses.
With the layering effect, with the spheres and the structure,
but having the upright, vertical habit of the grasses is fabulous,
and having them move in the wind as well.
Detailed stonework is one of the most striking design elements,
and it's used extensively throughout the back garden.
In the front we had sandstone from a local quarry,
and out the back is all bluestone from a local quarry.
This is a mostly dry-stone-presented walling
in its different forms,
and because they're a local stone,
it's not far for us to go and collect and hand-select the stone.
I can get exactly what I want to build walls and steps.
And you've also used some gabion cages out the front.
Yeah, using the same stone again,
just to demonstrate different ways to build walls.
Now, this whole area of the Adelaide Hills
is quite steeply sloping,
so you've done a lot of beautiful retaining of stone
to make the site useable.
As a designer, you try to create dimensions in gardens.
So if I'm designing a flat garden, I'm trying to create height.
Whereas here, I've got it.
I just have to...control it with the walls,
which will allow pathways,
and then flat, useable areas
to manage and construct what I want to do then.
As far as the ground surfaces, you've also approached them differently,
from boardwalks to stone steps to screenings?
Yeah, well, I like the boardwalk linking its way through here.
It's quite a soft, complementary material to the stone.
The screenings allow water to penetrate when it rains
in that productive area, so that's really important there.
And also having that crunch underneath your feet
is very, you know, in keeping with the style of garden going on here.
Jamie loves his plants and stonework,
but he also has a passion for a bit of garden sculpture.
I've worked closely with a blacksmith,
and I sort of described to him what I want to try and achieve,
and we've worked well to create features
to hold grapes up or support roses as well.
So, yeah, they're nice to look at and they're also quite functional.
Where did the inspiration for things like the rose arch come from?
Oh, a trip to Singapore, seeing the Supertrees
in the gardens by the bay.
And I just came home and I wanted some small Supertrees in the garden.
I gave a photo of a 'Pierre de Ronsard' rose to my blacksmith
and said, "This is what I want you to create,"
and he's made these beautifully cupped flowers.
So, in winter when the real 'Pierre de Ronsard' is dormant,
I've still got the cupped roses in the steel
that resemble the actual rose that's growing up it.
Finally, tucked away up the back
is an essential part of any garden -
the vegie patch,
and, of course, the chooks.
What a set-up, girls. (CHUCKLES)
Yeah, all made out of recycled jarrah.
It's beautiful.
This area here is the vegetable garden.
How important is it for you to be able to pick your own fresh produce?
Oh, super important - I mean, coming out here
and just picking what you need to eat,
having fresh basil, fresh tomato, fresh pumpkins,
it's really good.
We eat seasonally and we eat fresh.
And the chooks, how are they part of this system?
Well, the chooks are great because they get the food scraps
and, as a result, we get all the spent bedding straw
that goes into the compost bays,
which then are compost in the garden,
so it's just a great cycle.
And you get eggs. And we get eggs. We get eggs.
(CHICKENS CLUCK)
For a professional landscape designer
with an eye on creating a showcase for his clients,
this garden still manages to feel
very much like a personal statement for Jamie.
It's great just being able to walk around here
and enjoy it for what it is,
whether I'm picking produce or flowers for inside.
I really enjoy being out in the garden on the weekends,
even though I run a horticultural business during the week.
For me, being out here in the garden is really important.
You know, I can't keep out of it. I love it.