Coastal Gardens

One of the most jarring sights in our Victorian coastal towns is that of our ladies from posh suburbs bringing their standard roses, box hedges and ornamental pear trees and plonking them in our windswept, sandy soils with never a thought about our indigenous landscape.

Down on the Mornington Peninsula we have ‘new’ soils (if you can call them soils) that consist mostly of sand with very little organic matter and, being a peninsula, we are blown away by winds from both the north and south.

But our coastal Tea Trees (Leptospermum laevigatum) and Moonahs (Melaleuca lanceolata) are just as handsome and tortured by our gale-force winds as 100-year-old Olives in Tuscany. The Japanese revere age in their trees and manipulate their Pines by pruning to create that impression, but we can enjoy it all free of charge.

We are blessed with an existing treescape that nearly all visitors preserve and create a garden around.

With the dominant colour being the blue sky and the sea, our gardens need to pick up tones of grey, which suit plants that are used to hot summers and use little water for 2-3 months. Hot colours of red and yellow from Callistemon and Spanish Brooms seem jarring in our bright summer sun, but cool colours such as blue from Agapanthus and white from Shasta daisies (which flower together) have a cooling effect.

Judging by their lush green foliage and 50 years as clipped hedges, trees like Monterey Cypress and Pines are successful but they seem outdated now with white stone or weatherboard cottages replaced by modern steel and glass houses.

So, the images here will guide you pictorially in choosing the right drought-tolerant plants that thrive in lousy sandy soils under extreme dry summers as well as being tolerant of salt winds for coastal areas (but not for climates with humid summers).

Plants that thrive by the sea

Perennials (spring flowering)