Community Garden and Mini Bushwalk
KU Preschool
A mini bushwalk with numbered stepping stones through native grasses, shrubs and wonderous sculptures by Orlando Norris, community growing area, and yarning circle for planning, playing and learning.
Contemplation Garden
For a family of sculptors and their memories
The key feature of the garden was always going to be the large steel sculpture by Elizabeth's late son Luis Trujillo whose artworks informed every part of our design journey.
The design builds on what was already a very leafy habitat garden, adding undulating small lawns that flow into beds of soft lime grasses with splatterings of orange and fuchsia in herbaceous perennials, bromeliads and cordylines for soft ombre layers. Elizabeth decided her seat should be a replica of one she always loved by her friend, the Port Kembla modernist sculptor Gino Sanguinetti. Sculptor Orlando Norris built the replica from Elizabeth's sketch where she had added some symbolism of her own to Sanguinetti's design.
Sculpture Garden
A welcoming garden at One Thirty Art Studios, Wollongong, providing alfresco seating for artists and visitors and an ever-changing exhibition space for sculptures.
Pocket Billabong
A stylish, coastal space that feels like the bush
This design for a compact Corrimal "beer garden" was all about loose, bushy plant forms with rustic, minimalist hardscaping and generously proportioned low-profile sandstone boulders - arranged as if they’ve always been there. Warm natural textures include aged timber sleepers, cor-ten steel and decomposed granite. A small billabong was designed by Glitter and Leaves and constructed by Josh Griggs, mimicking local natural swimming holes . The billabong has an understated waterfall, a gentle pebble beach, and indigenous aquatic and marsh plants providing refuge for frogs, native fish and insects. An outdoor shower sheilded by native vines awaits the clients when they come home from the nearby surf.
Painterly Coastal
This Woonona project is about linking a new front garden to an established back garden. The back garden is vast, verdant and colourful: it feels like being on a lush tropical holiday. The new front garden on the other hand is all about an established grass tree. To blend this wonderful arid specimen with the Tropicana backdrop we developed a palette of foliage texture and colour - magenta, blue, green - through to the straw tones of the grass tree. Like the back garden and the home itself, there is a wild and artistic feel achieved with meandering goat tracks through densely planted exotics and indigenous local species.
Cafe courtyard concept, Thirroul
Hot in summer, cold in winter this courtyard has existing wisteria along one fence, and bamboo along the other. This concept adds a large planter box and irregular shaped steel pergola, replaces astro turf with mondo grass, and adds deciduous wisteria for seasonal shade/sun.
Frog Pond Design Workshop
A two-day workshop with children aged 7 to 13, observing plants, water and landscapes to collaboratively design a suburban frog habitat. Key concepts explored in the workshop include biodiversity, plant communities and adaptations, habitats and ecosystems.
Pru's Pink and Purple verge
A pretty gift to the street
The idea of including Stachys bizantina, which featured in the clients' wedding bouquet, grew into a very pretty plant palette for this Australian cottage garden facing the street - with a dazzling array of pinks, purple and silver.
La la la's
Wollongong's premier live music venue. Glitter & Leaves has added potted native, indigenous and exotic plants to the indoors and outdoor garden spaces.
Walang Express & Rest cafe
A garden makeover introducing clipped shrubs, indigenous plants, lively perennials to a hot, dry street side landscape. Enjoy the flamboyant colour as you grab breakfast and coffee, pick up groceries and visit the beautician or hair salon.
Figtree Retro
This 1960s home borrows the view of Mount Keira escarpment and a glimpse of the distant sea. It sits high above the busy street, embraced by gargantuan eucalyous trees.
The steeply rising front garden is beginning to provide privacy while maintaining horizon views. The garden is terraced with a food garden blending into native plantings down to the verge. The verge is being developed into a "garden path" flowers and illawarra native walk for neighbourhood walkers as part of Wollongong Councils urban greening project, so watch this space!
The back garden is gently sloping with a deck by Brensco Construction. Buffalo grass lawn ends in some places with bush rocks and hand-made stepping stones, and in other places mingles uncut with cascading Carex apressa, Festuca glauca and various other grasses. Reclaimed breezeblocks edge the back fence planting of grevilleas, acacia and callistemon. Hardenbergia and fairy lights festoon the grove of giant Eucalypts
Some of my favourite plants are the aromatic mint bushes, salvia, and firecracker plants - all of which grow easily from cuttings.
West Wollongong Early Learning Centre
A bush learning garden for preschoolers
This garden features mosaic stepping stones and wooden wind chimes made by the children in Glitter & Leaves workshops. The garden is planted with a selection of edible, tactile and blooming indigenous plants. Stories and discussion take place in a yarning circle.
Riverside
Riverside in the Kangaroo Valley is the garden I learned to garden in - my parents' garden. This is an expansive mediterranean and native Australian garden. Many of the plants in my gardens originate from this garden in Kangaroo Valley. It's rustic, naturalistic style with strong connection to the surrounding environment is a key inspiration in my designs.
Old Bowral
I was thinking about the gardens, mountains and meadows of Murakami novels when I created this garden.
Old Bowral is nestled into the side of Mount Gibralter, populated by romantic prunus and cedars. Weatherboard cottages and their picket fences are smothered in roses, wisteria, and clemetis.
When I started on this garden there were plenty of formal buxus hedges, Acer palmatuns and azaleas, a dead weeping cherry and an enormous, pendulous magic faraway/Wind-up bird Norway Pine.
New plantings included rockroses, marguerite daisies, apples trees, salvia, yarrow, roses and the bowral favourite of course - tulips. I added various ameoba shapes to soften the formal hedges. A couple of chickens have recently moved in and are enjoying the garden. My favourite garden task is hedge clipping!
