Good garden designing is easy when working with nature

Monday, June 28, 2021

Want your home garden to look its best all year round?

Have you ever stopped to think of how important gardens are to our Australian society? From over 60,000 years ago to today, the environment around us has shaped our lives and helped us bond with mother earth.

In the last few hundred years, there has been an evolution of our Aussie domestic gardens to align with our 6 basic principles of architectural values - axis, symmetry, hierarchy, datum, rhythm and transformation.

Early pre-settlement Australia was rugged bushland established by natural forces & assisted by controlled burns by First Nation peoples. When the first European settlers started building their dwelling in various parts of Australia they longed for the gardens of home & so the Victorian era of garden design seeped its way across the countryside. This included both picturesque & gardenesque flavours, the latter which used exotic flora features to complement the area’s natural plants.

The next phase of gardening eras brought out the feminine influence and gardens took on more structure, with borders shaping & defining the outdoor areas, and more native plants being incorporated into the designs. This was followed by gardens involving more local environment materials & design styles.

When the Modernist era took hold in the 1940’s the gardens took a lower profile to allow the dwellings to be the star of the show & the gardens a minimalist feature. In the eighties the formal gardens made a comeback & included lots of hedges, feature grasses & fragrant plantings. From the 1990’s a merging of the flora & man-made features crept its way through our residential landscape designs. Wilderness inspired elements like waterfalls were blended with artistically created garden sculptures and an understanding of the importance of working with nature became the underlining theme. No longer were we trying to control nature & her wildness – instead we embraced the raw nature of the various landscapes around Australia and designed our gardens to be at one with our environs.

Our community's plant nursery on Bribie Island reflects this popular trend of working with our local climate & soils to best provide resilience to our local plantings, minimise our need for watering, and reduce excess nutrient runoff into our coastal waterways.

Grow Plant Nursery provides an experiential journey through our store gardens to help you understand where best to locate your plants at home. We also use & sell the eco-friendly Grow BOSS – bio organic sustainable solution to fertilise our plants, and have a refill station in our garden centre to help you save both money & protect our local ecosystems.

Grow Nursery is open 7 days behind Inner Room Bribie & Village Deli Bongaree in Bongaree Village shopping precinct.