The Garden at Stonefields

Text taken from Chapter One, From St Ambrose Farm to Stonefields

In a reassuring twist of fate, my father discovered that my great great grandmother settled in Victoria at Spring Hill, on a farm bordered by Kangaroo Creek. As this creek is quite short, that would mean that the Denver property was very close to if not part of the same property my great great grandmother had once lived on. All the signs were indicating that it was the right move.

I promptly signed the contract, but a couple of hurdles were still to be overcome, one major one being that the vendor had not yet obtained a permit to erect a dwelling on the site. According to the way the land was zoned in the area, houses could only be built on properties of 50 acres or more, and my property was only 40 acres. I'm all in favour of this rule, designed to protect the rural nature of the area, which after all was the very reason I was moving there. It's the vendor's responsibility to obtain this permit, and he had employed a private town planner to do it. For the next three months there was a lot of toing and froing between the town planner and the Hepburn Shire Council. The other major hurdle was that my book about St Ambrose Farm, The Enchanted Garden, was not due to be published for another twelve months. I made the timing work in my favour: it would allow me a year to plan and obtain permits for the house before I could sell Woodend and start building at Denver. With all this in mind I negotiated a six-month settlement on the sale of Denver and started on my plans. It was the beginning of an important journey in my gardening life: the Denver property would gradually become Stonefields and Stonefields would become primarily about me and my personality. The garden and this book are all about my failures, my complexities, who I believe I should be and who I am not. Stonefields is a deeply personal garden.

I decided not to hire an architect for the house, instead opting for a construction firm that would document and construct. The house and garden would be in complete harmony. My first stage of planning was to run through the faults of St Ambrose Farm and make a list of what the new property needed:

House

• more light coming in (no verandah to make the house dark) ceilings not so high better heating (open fires rather than enclosed fan-forced heaters) and better insulation a separate study for designing in peace and quiet a kitchen with stone rather than laminate benchtops a master bedroom with a separate dressing room and away from guest bedrooms flywire screens that slide away clear physical and visual links between house and garden.

Garden

• clear physical and visual links between house and garden
  • water flow throughout the garden better drainage fewer garden rooms deeper garden beds services down the driveway rather than through the garden areas better, longer lasting garden edging better vermin control integration into the broader landscape.