By Derek Schlennstedt
Over the past 15 years, Bev Fox has transformed a traditional suburban lawn and flower garden into a gentle garden featuring a tapestry of Australian plants.
With a deep knowledge of indigenous plants that informed her plant selection and design, she has slowly added more and more to her colourful garden.
This September, garden lovers have the opportunity to experience Bev’s little garden of bliss through Open Gardens Victoria.
She said it was her love for the bush that inspired her to create an Australian-style garden that features rocks, curved paths and a cute frog pond.
“I’m trying to really make it a bushy garden and give it a bush feel, but I like colour,” she said.
“They come from all over Australia so it’s quite colourful.”
The garden has an easterly aspect and features a large eucalyptus nicholii, commonly known as the narrow-leaved black peppermint or willow peppermint.
Both sides of a central path are filled with a variety of small, colourful plants such as chorizemas, grevilleas and hibbertias.
The nature strip has an ironbark eucalypt as the street tree and an acacia boormanii that came up as a seedling.
Low growing daisies, grasses and other hardy plants create a hardy understorey.
Bev said she wanted to create a garden which she could be a part of, rather than just look at.
“I grew up in Boronia and it was bush in those days – it’s certainly anything but now, but when I moved I wanted to take that with me,” she said.
Although featuring only indigenous plants, Bev said there was plenty of colour with banksias, prostantheras, and boronias making up the back garden.
It has a naturalistic feel evoking the bush, Bev has also used repetition of planting and design features that give complexity and overall unity.
The garden will be open on 29 and 30 September as part of the Open Gardens Victoria and is at 6 Camellia Crescent, The Basin. Entry is $8.
