Going Native – Arkular’s Flinders House with Garden Design by Jim Fogarty Features in the Australian
Mansion
Magazine
Careful planning overcame challenging conditions to yield a flourishing garden that embraces the uniqueness of indigenous plants.
Original Article by Libby Moffet for Mansion Magazine
A Holiday Cottage in Flinders
When landscape designer Jim Fogarty built his holiday cottage in the Victorian seaside village of Flinders in 2015, the land around it was almost barren.
“It was a completely vacant block,” Fogarty recalls. “There was just paddock and mud and some agapanthus that I got rid of before I started replanting and revegetating.”
Nine years later, the transformation of the 1018sq m property is astounding. Eight-metre high wattle trees and strapping ironbark eucalypts soar above flowering banksias, grevilleas and bottlebrushes in a spectacular landscaped garden that showcases more than 800 native plants representing almost 40 species.
“There’s a lot of people who are really interested in Australian plants now – they’re keen to engage with me to learn about them, and I love that.” Fogarty says he planned the garden before creating the holiday home he shares with his wife Victoria and their two daughters, Lily, 16, and Rose, 14.
Working to a budget and aware of the challenges of building on land liable to flood, the landscape designer opted for a pre-fab house by Arkular.
Clad in a dark grey Colorbond, the home took 16 weeks to build off-site and only three hours to install on the block, minimising disturbance to the land and neighbours in the Mornington Peninsula town about 70km south of Melbourne.
Facing due north, the six-star energy-rated home is set at the rear of the block to maximise garden space and features two bedrooms, one bathroom and an open kitchen and living room, as well as a large ironbark timber deck and pergola that Fogarty designed to expand the living area in warmer months.
View full details of the Flinders House here.
A Modern Take on an Old Fishing Cottage
Fogarty says the home is a modern take on the old fishing cottages of Flinders, which he remembers well from childhood days spent at his parents’ holiday house in the township.
“I’d like to think that even if I was rich I wouldn’t build a massive place,” he says. “It’s nice to build something smaller and let the garden be the focus.”
Stretching in front of the home’s deck, the flourishing garden is particularly remarkable because the block is often sodden during winter months, with plant beds under water. “It gets pretty wet – all your traditional coastal plants would just drown here,” says Fogarty.
Adapting to Challenging Conditions
Not only did Fogarty tackle the challenging conditions by selecting plants that thrive in heavy clay soil, he drew inspiration from the block’s flood zoning for the garden design.
The property’s kikuyu lawn has been shaped to represent the movement of water across the landscape, swirling round the garden beds and rising in mounds near the driveway, while the driveway surface is broken up with colourful plantings of fan flower fashioned to represent water drops.
To assist with drainage, Fogarty created a large sandpit that fills with water during the wet months – an idea suggested by his eldest daughter Lily, who was only seven at the time.
The landscape designer now uses the space as a testing ground for his native garden projects in the Mornington Peninsula area, and often brings clients to his property to discuss planting options.
“People are starting to really warm to the whole notion of planting a garden that will survive on rainwater and provide a habitat and food source for local birds,” he says.
About 60 per cent of the garden’s plants are indigenous to the area, with the rest drawn from around Australia. As he strolls across the garden, Fogarty points out a cut leaf banksia from Albany in Western Australia that he’s started growing locally.
“It opens into this amazing beautiful golden flower that’s nearly a foot long – the birds just go nuts for them,” he says. Nearby there are native grasses, which Fogarty burns throughout winter to encourage summer regrowth, and a low-growing wetland plant known as knobby club rush, which Fogarty labels a “remnant” indigenous plant.
“I didn’t plant this,” he says. “It would have been growing here for thousands of years and because I’ve started tending the garden again it’s come back. I find that amazing.”
While the bare block was devoid of birds when Fogarty bought it, his garden now attracts a bounty of feathered friends, including black cockatoos, galahs, wattle birds, finches and wrens.
“I’m not a bird expert, but when you get to the end of the day and you’re sitting on the deck watching a plethora of birds in the garden, it’s pretty rewarding,” he says.
