Designer Jo Ferguson conceived her own emotive, flower-strewn garden on the Mornington Peninsula by answering the same question she asks all gardeners: where have you been most happy?
ONE of the horticultural hits of last summer was a coastal garden that didn’t set out to impress. Perhaps that’s why it resonated so strongly. Intensely personal, this garden seems almost incidentally mind-blowing.
It’s set high on a hill at Flinders on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, but on visiting you feel as if you’re tumbling down into Wonderland like Alice. Saturated with colour and layered with texture, this garden is filled to the brim with plants that move in the wind and glimmer in the sun.
Jo Ferguson and her partner, Simon Hazel, created it in about three years. When it opened to the public last summer, more than 2000 people visited on a single weekend.
Their response was effusive. Gardener and designer Simon Rickard, for one, described it as “beyond stunning”. On Instagram, Rickard—who, for the record, keeps his own exquisite home garden—said, “It’s one of those rare gardens which makes you feel like you’ve done EVERYTHING wrong in your own STUPID, hateful garden, and want to bulldoze the lot and start again.”
But as Rickard knows, you can’t copy this kind of garden. You might take away some ideas, but as for creating a whole sweeping space of your own, you’ve got to go with how you feel. Or, as Ferguson puts it, “you need to tune in to yourself, with what you love, and it will guide you”.
