A Secret Garden in the Adelaide Hills

Gardeners are known for our generosity. We are happy to share our time, ideas, experience and, of course, our plants and seeds.

But opening your private garden goes to the next level: to invite the public in to observe, learn, scrutinise and borrow ideas is a gift to your fellow gardeners.

This is why I was excited to see one of our ‘young gun’ gardeners, Brendan Power, open his garden recently through Open Gardens South Australia. Only five years ago it had been a neglected former potato farm. Furthermore the 2019/20 bushfires lapped the property and burnt a shed but spared the house and most of the garden – a setback that was soon overcome with hard work and enthusiasm.

Brendan is a horticulturist who completed his studies at the Adelaide Botanic Garden whilst working at the Diggers garden shop and gardening professionally. He spends every other waking moment tending his own most splendid garden, which brims with a vast array of horticultural treasures, surrounded by a menagerie of ducks, chickens and geese.

The quest to find an affordable property and create a dream garden began after many years renting in inner city Adelaide. Brendan and his partner, Simon, finally found a modest cottage, formerly a 4-roomed tin shack on an acre of land, close to the town of Lobethal. It sits in the Onkaparinga Valley about an hour from Adelaide. They called their home ‘Tweed Cottage’ as a tribute to Lobethal’s former key industry, the Onkaparinga Woollen Mill and Tweedvale – the temporary name of the town during the war

Garden vision

Their vision was to create a secret garden to entertain and enjoy with friends, a garden that was sustainable and filled with beautiful flowers as well as being productive. It had to be a garden where Brendan could indulge his love of flowers and sustain his various floristry projects

Much backbreaking work ensued to tame the site and reveal the bones of the garden to be. The property is steep, forming an inverted triangle with the narrowest area at the top, and is surrounded by a borrowed landscape of grassy paddocks and scattered bush. It had largely been taken over by blackberries and woody perennial weeds although there were some surviving trees including an ash, eucalypts, a dying Norfolk Island pine, coprosma, old quince, plum and a very sick lemon tree.

Brendan is the plantsperson whilst Simon builds – and they can turn their hand to anything. This included hiring earth-moving equipment to excavate behind the house to create their dry stone wall herb courtyard, fencing, lighting and building structures, including the gabled fruit tree and berry enclosure and the most glorious bespoke chicken and goose house.

equipment to excavate behind the house to create their dry stone wall herb courtyard, fencing, lighting and building structures, including the gabled fruit tree and berry enclosure and the most glorious bespoke chicken and goose house.

The secret garden

The main section of the garden is romantic – one could say a love poem to floral beauty. It’s unexpected, as this simple property gives no inkling of the horticultural delights beyond. Brendan utilised an existing constructed winter creek and planted an eclectic mix of cottage and woodland plants whilst working with existing shrubs and trees.

This is where his true plantsmanship comes to the fore with his uncanny sense of plant combinations and foliage and flower framing. Favourites include epimedium, hellebore, aquilegia, hydrangea and, on the sunnier edges, magnolia, pomegranate, lupins, penstemons, cornflowers, False Queen Anne’s lace, poppies, iris, dahlias and liliums, with foxgloves stealing the show, growing very tall in this ideal microclimate, adding vertical drama to the vibrant mix of flowers. Climbing roses are supported by branches from the garden with bird nests hidden within. Every season new seeds are sown to provide a continual display of colour, interest and supply for Brendan’s floristry.

Dry garden and star gazing

At the top of the block, Brendan has been experimenting with low-water use plants under overhanging eucalypts. Success so far with hardy perennials such as phlomis and echium as well as a range of natives like brachychiton, westringia, lomandra, eremophila, dianella, scaevola, and also agave and puya, which are linked by a mass planting of Cotyledon orbiculata. Adding a distinctive salvaged farm ‘seat’ has made this a favourite spot to enjoy the garden and the surrounding rural landscape. Next time I visit there will be a cast iron bath installed for evening bathing and star gazing.

There is always a ‘what’s next’ for gardeners. In Brendan’s case he has the beginnings of a vegie patch after a generous gift from a local bushfire recovery group, and for Simon, paving the terrace area where an existing above ground pool was removed and then building a simple pergola for summer shade.

Brendan’s horticultural expertise, together with his love of flowers, has resulted in a most beautiful garden testament to his already vast knowledge of growing plants, despite his relative horticultural youth at 38 years old. I call it a ‘love letter to flowers’.

Brendan and Simon donated the entry fee of their open home to The Diggers Foundation.