DAVID KENNEDY AND ANDREW DUNSHAE HAVE DEVOTED MORE THAN A DECADE TO CREATING A SHOWPIECE GARDEN JUST WEST OF THE NSW BLUE MOUNTAINS.
The naysayers told nurseryman David Kennedy and his fashion designer partner Andrew Dunshae they’d never grow a garden at Little Hartley on the western slopes of the NSW Blue Mountains. David and Andrew are way too polite to voice it themselves, but the oasis they have created since they bought the eight-acre (3.2-hectare) site in 2014 shows just how wrong the negative Nellies were.
“We’d outgrown our garden in Katoomba and Andrew found this place. It was just a cow paddock covered in grass, weeds and blackberries,” David recalls. “There was one gum tree, but the land did have stunning views of the Blue Mountains and full exposure to sun.”
They started work on the Highfields garden almost as soon as the contract was signed. Then they built the gatehouse, which is an events space for when they open the garden, at the top of the sloping site. Finally, they added the main house, which was at lock-up stage just as COVID started. “We were very lucky,” David says. “We probably wouldn’t have been able to afford the building costs when prices sky-rocketed during and post-pandemic.”
He confesses there were a few “what have we done?” moments, beginning when they started planting trees around the boundary and realised they needed big machinery to create the holes. “In the mountains, you could dig a hole to China with a shovel, but here the ground was like concrete,” he says. “We got in a local excavator to rip it and put in paths and then another local with a tractor for further help.”
Taking the how-to-eat-an-elephant approach, they began one bite at a time and started at the top with the dry garden, which contains many Mediterranean plants and is not watered “unless we can’t stand the stress of it.” This section leads down to the prairie with meadow-style plantings and rare perennials, grasses and summer annuals, then to a birch grove and woodland garden with shade-loving plants. From there, basalt steps lead the visitor down to the Asiatic garden with Mt Fuji cherries, rock formations and two ponds linked by cascades. Next is the long border with single-colour sections and finally more roses in front of the main house, which, closer in, is framed by topiary.
David says they’ve learnt to work with the block, which has a 790-metre elevation and about 800mm of rain annually. The slightly drier climate than they were used to 200m higher in Katoomba means roses thrive, but the colder and hotter temperature range — with -6°C not uncommon in winter and low- to mid-30s the summer norm — meant some adjustments were necessary.
“I used to hate roses until I planted them,” David says. “They really like it here and now we have about 800 bushes, a mixture of old-fashioned varieties and hybrids including David Austins. The soil is silt with a clay underlay, so we had to pick plants that can take extremes of wet and bone-dry conditions. You cope with that by adding lots of organic matter.”
They also deviated from the master plan on a few occasions, changing the layout to make the garden flow better. One memorable adjustment involved digging up 60 birch trees when they realised that the grove and prairie sections worked better the other way round.
David had many careers — in real estate, disability services and even a stint as a florist — on his CV, when he turned to gardening professionally more than a decade ago. He’s always loved gardens and credits his grandmother, “who could grow a fence post if she set her mind to it”, and her garden in the lower Blue Mountains, as his inspiration.
He developed a passion for rare plants, grows a huge range of perennials, woodland plants and drought-tolerant species and sells them through his mail-order nursery, Clover Hill Rare Plants, and at open days during the Hartley Valley Garden Festival, which is held in March and October every year.
“We initially thought we’d open the garden more frequently,” David says. “But people’s reluctance to travel past the ‘sandstone curtain’, as the mountains are known, meant visitor numbers were low. We started the festival to encourage people to venture out to see three or four gardens and that has been very successful. We also open by arrangement to bus groups of up to 50, so lots of groups get to see the garden and have morning tea with us.”
While Highfields today is a year-round visual treat for the casual observer, it’s also a lot of work. “We’ll never be finished,” David says. “Andrew has just put in a new pond and more walls in the formal area and we’ve just completed the vegie garden. Any gardener will tell you there’s always something to do, the list just keeps growing. Besides, your tastes change.”
David adds that his passion for ornamental grasses has diminished through the years and he’s probably taken out as many as he’s planted. “They compete with other plants,” he explains. “In this climate, they seed profusely and tend to take over.”
Nonetheless, David says the garden’s great gift is the wildlife it attracts. “Right now, I’m looking at a flock of finches,” he says. “We’ve created a haven for little birds. And there are frogs and fish in the ponds, an echidna visits the dry garden and we get the occasional wombat and kangaroos. There’s the odd unwelcome visitor, as snakes are inevitable. But, on balance, the beauty outweighs the bad and that’s what keeps us motivated.” AC
