A beautifully laid out garden full of stunning vistas, views and superb structures.

Spread over more than an acre of gently sloping hillside, Brian’s Garden surrounds an elegant, traditionally styled home constructed nine years ago.

The owner, Margaret, and her late husband, Brian, had returned to Adelaide after living overseas and were keen for their new property to reflect elements of garden styles they had admired in their travels. The garden is named for Brian because, although it was professionally designed, his enthusiasm and appreciation for aesthetics influenced the layout and planting.

Close to the house, the garden is formal with roses and perennials softening the hardscaping and hedges, creating strong design lines.  A patio area features a charming circular pond with an ornate bronze fountain, adding the soothing sound of trickling water and providing a lovely view from the extensive, well-equipped entertainment area.

Further from the house, the style is more relaxed with stone walls retaining the sloping land and creating a series of garden beds filled with a rich mix of foliage plants that blend beautifully to create interesting combinations of shape, leaf colour and texture. Conifers with columnar form rise like exclamation marks from the understory planting, and trees, including many deciduous varieties, mark the changing of the seasons, some flowering in spring, also providing summer shade and colour in autumn.

Paths between the garden beds gradually zigzag down to a quiet and serene Japanese-inspired Zen area. Here, beneath an avenue of crabapple trees expertly pruned to create a leafy green ’roof’, large stepping stones lead through waves of mondo grass and gravel to a tea house that Brian constructed. A traditional Japanese-style bridge, painted vivid red, crosses a rocky spillway that carries winter rain to fill a small pond.

The features of the garden are numerous and include an impressive entrance portico, several pergolas, a fishpond and fountain, rose-covered arches, flights of steps, a stony winter creek bed, statuary, a formal rose garden, a putting green, and a tennis court.

In 2017, the house was judged the ‘Custom Built House of the Year’ by the SA Housing Industry Association. In 2024, designer Jamie McIlwain of Hills Classic Gardens received three Master Landscapers SA ‘Awards of Excellence’ for the Japanese-style section of the garden.