The next best thing to having a garden designed by Fiona Brockhoff might be to design your own with her advice front of mind.
When, almost 30 years ago, Fiona Brockhoff bought the Sorrento property that has become one of Australia’s greatest private gardens she was on a steep learning curve.
“People need gardens more than ever,” Brockhoff says when we speak ahead of the book launch. “What I would like to see is for gardening to be elevated to a bigger platform. I want to make people think about how they interact with the world and how they approach life.
Pergolas and feature walls are not so malleable, though, and for these sorts of constructions Brockhoff recommends taking a photograph of where you imagine it will go and drawing it onto the picture “With a pergola, you can make it higher, lower, extend it out, bring it in, anything to try to relate it to the scale of the architecture and the scale of the building.
But whatever you opt for, she says texture is everything and that the layering of different textures – of plants and other surfaces – is what gives a scene depth and interest and creates a mood.She puts more emphasis on leaves than flowers: “The foliage is what you observe for four seasons of the year whereas most flowers are fleeting ... The range of greens is almost infinite.”
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