Gardens of WA: Why starting gardens over and just following trends is a massive mistake

Do you have a monstera deliciosa in your house? How about a succulent bowl? If you’ve been paying attention to gardening trends over the past few years, you’ll have watched these plants fade in and out of popularity, the ridiculousness peaking when a variegated monstera cutting could fetch an easy $500 online. Gardening follows fashion, just like everything else — I get it. But it’s such a shame. So many plants become more beautiful with age, but instead of allowing them to mature, the fashion changes and we throw them out, clear our blocks, and ‘reinvent’ our gardens with whatever flash-in-the-pan plants are popular right now. The result of this kneejerk urge to constantly update our yards is that everyone’s garden starts to look the same. Not Sandy Honey’s. “This used to be a dairy farm that went all the way down to the highway,” Sandy tells me, standing at her wooden back fence, looking onto a series of stables in the block beyond. “I’ve left the fence like this so you can see through it,” she adds, “it’s probably 50 years old.” The fence is not the only historical part of the garden that Sandy has embraced. Her house, built in 1935, looks out over a garden filled with plants that have been allowed to grow into their full glory. Many of these are plants that others might have automatically removed, deeming them ‘out of date’. Luckily, Sandy has taken the opposite approach. To one side, a bird of paradise stretches out beside a camellia, in the understorey of a 130-year-old jacaranda. An English ivy climbs the side wall, its trunk as wide and gnarled as a tree. Oyster plants have been allowed to spread along the back of the garden, intermingling with self-sown nasturtiums. “I love the architectural quality of the old plants,” Sandy says. ”It’s only in WA that they are allowed to clear a block — they’re not allowed to do that anywhere else”. Rather than clear the way to fill her block exclusively with newly acquired plants and materials, Sandy celebrates the original elements of her home and garden. A back extension blends seamlessly with the rest of the house, and the backyard is a mix of original plants and tough, Mediterranean species that Sandy has added over the years. The result is a thriving garden with the kind of character that only comes from years of growing, and a gardener who embraces the plants that were there to begin with, many of which can’t even be bought now. “You go into plant nurseries now and it’s all the same,” Sandy remarks. “Every geranium is the same now. It’s not that they’re bad but there’s no variety — it means every garden looks exactly the same.” If you want to grow an interesting garden, the message is clear: resist the urge to constantly ‘start over’ and allow yourself to see the beauty in what is already growing. You will almost certainly be pleasantly surprised.