July 1st, 2025Beetham’s Botanicals
Well here I am penning another article for you, the reader, to enjoy…
This time I’ll be giving tips and advice on garden design and construction that can be initiated during winter.
I’ll briefly start with some facts about myself. I began my horticultural life back in the late 1970s working at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne as a surveying assistant to plot all the living plants growing in the gardens and it was this introduction to thousands of plants that gave me the confidence I carry today.
So when it comes to setting up garden designs and subsequent construction I draw back on my acquired knowledge over nearly 50 years. The following tips and advice will not include specific details such as lengths and widths of sleepers for example, but will give some ideas about landscape materials, irrigation, soil preparation, garden-bed orientation and plant selections.
- Drawing up a plan of your garden, whether it’s a new one or the rejuvenation of an older one, can seem daunting with many options available but important elements such as the property location and orientation, climate and soil profile(s) will certainly narrow down the choices. So the first thing is to locate north, east, west and south directions, check your local climatic conditions (i.e. minimum and maximum temperatures, prone to wind, etc) and find out what soil type(s) are on your property.
- Now you can begin by setting out garden and vegetable beds, irrigation, lawns, paths, paving, retaining walls, steps and any other elements such as water features, pergolas and water tanks to mention a few. Here’s a tip – write down what you want in the garden, things like style, favourite plants, veggie garden and landscape features – and then fit them into the landscape.
- As part of your garden design it is worth noting that to retrofit an irrigation system can be a nightmare so be smart and think of the positioning of drippers, microsprays and pop-ups – if you’re considering having lawn. If you have a machine such as a mini-excavator on site it could be used to dig trenches to lay irrigation piping, otherwise it’s by hand.
- Your choice of landscape materials could make or break a good garden design so here’s a few tips. If you’re using rocks as garden edges, retaining walls, rockeries or features, be sure to choose appropriate sizes that will blend into the landscape giving a natural appearance. Giant rocks in a small courtyard for example would be overpowering and cumbersome. Mixing timber (sleepers) with rocks is a good marriage as are serpentine paths filled with a gravel that matches surrounding elements. The choice of new soil to plant in is very important so I recommend a good all-round loam loaded up with organic compost – using rich volcanic soil is OK if that’s what you’ve got already.
- So to plant selections. Now that you’ve worked out orientation, soil type, local climate and landscape elements, it’s simply a matter of putting the jigsaw together. Sounds easy, not really, there are many other factors to consider including root invasion, pet friendliness and everything happening at once, so the tip here is to have a seasonal approach to what plants go in, creating interest all year round. Of course I could go on about impending climate change but that’ll be another article in itself.
- Here’s some plants for you to peruse: daphne odora (winter daphne); malus trilobata (Lebanese crabapple) – flowering in late spring, fruiting and showing coloured foliage in mid-to-late autumn; ginkgo biloba (maidenhair tree) – interesting leaves that start going bright golden yellow in late autumn; dichroa x versicolor (evergreen blue hydrangea) – starts flowering in late summer continuing through to very early winter; callistemon citrinus white Anzac (white-flowering bottlebrush) – flowering late spring; and Elaeocarpus reticulatus prima donna (blueberry ash) – flowering early summer followed by small blue berries.
Cheers John Beetham (Trees in Australia)
Next time: The implications of Climate Change on plants
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