Silver linings

It was winter 2020 and Esme Durkan was meant to be on a working holiday in France. Instead, the then 19-year-old was back in her family home in Sydney’s inner west, on Wangal country, riding out the pandemic with her parents and brothers.

Like so many other people that year, the interior architecture student had been spending a lot of time at home. She had also been reading about biodiversity. And reflecting on the front garden of their house, with its shrubs and squares of lawn, she’d come to the conclusion they could do better.

The family was on board, so Esme got stuck in. Her mum, a gardener of many years, worked with Esme to dig out the lawn in rectangles, and transplant it to the back garden, which was in need of patching since the arrival of their newest household member, an Irish wolfhound.

Soil was delivered one cold, wet August day, and planting got underway. Esme started with mostly succulents – snapped off and then propagated from her mum’s collection – and next were some grasses.

“Everything was small in the beginning – just strands or tubestock we bought at nurseries or via mail order, and cuttings from neighbours or other gardeners,” says Esme. “The mangave, for example, was gifted to me by a gardener living along the Cooks River, where I go for walks.”

She introduced a couple of simple water features, and created two raised beds from weathered steel. Esme shaped the steel herself, using the bullnose edge of their front wall as a guide for the curves. “I laid out a towel and used my body weight to bend it over that,” she says.

There was plenty of interest in the project from locals and visitors to the park across the road. “It turned out to be a way to socialise with people but still be socially distanced,” Esme says. “Every time I was out there, people would start speaking to me. It was a good way to connect.”

There was plenty of commentary, too. The initial plantings looked so “tiny and out of balance”, some onlookers expressed doubt at how it would all come together. But Esme was unfazed. She’d used design software to draw up sun diagrams, model finished heights and widths, and get a feel for how the garden would look from various angles. She also knew the garden would grow into itself, as gardens do.

Almost four years on, the garden is still evolving as Esme introduces new plants and moves or removes existing ones. “Initially, I wanted to keep to a palette of browns, purples, greens and blues, and focus on texture and shape,” she says. “There’s more onus now on flowers.”

While most of these plants produce only incidental flowers, they still pack a punch, adding pops of yellow and fire-engine red to the landscape, and drawing in bees and other insects, just as Esme had hoped.

The bulk of the garden has been grown from cuttings or divisions. She doesn’t usually plant into pots – only if she’s planning on moving something, or she wants to give plants away. Most propagated specimens go straight into the soil, which she is constantly improving with homemade compost. And once a plant has been watered in once or twice, it’s usually not irrigated after that. “Maybe once or twice
in summer, we might water the garden.”

“My approach to gardening is to walk in after the day and run around doing little tasks, like dividing or moving things or weeding,” Esme says.

“It’s impromptu, and I might find that I don’t have the right equipment out here at the time, but it works for me. It’s less intimidating. And we finish by having tea on the verandah!”

Once a ‘non-event’, the verandah has been transformed over time by Esme’s mum into a mini plant oasis. It’s now a favourite family spot for sitting, chatting, working and drinking tea, and its elevated aspect – looking out to the crepe myrtles that line the street, and the park across the road – is very restful.

The verandah is also a good vantage point for viewing the verge garden that Esme planted up about a year ago. It’s dog-friendly, kid-friendly, and has nothing spiky or allergenic. And now she’s eyeing off a strip of land that separates the end of their cul-de-sac from a main road. With plans to broaden her interior architecture degree to also take in architecture and landscape design, it’s clear that this is just the start for Esme!

Header image by Brent Wilson