The best of the new house and garden designs in Darwin are equal to the best in the world. Superb tropical houses and gardens are being built that are beautiful but also pleasant to live in amidst the stifling heat and humidity of our most northern capital city. The house and garden belonging to Angela Keith and Mark Jennings is a patch of Balinese bliss where sometimes it’s hard to know where the garden starts and the house ends.

Sensible design

Angela and Mark’s house and garden melds Balinese design and modern Australian elements. The result is one of the most practical, tropical residences you could ever find. As with Balinese tradition, the house is divided into a number of separate buildings (in this case three) linked by a veranda, fish ponds and gardens. The buildings open up with long eaves hanging out around the buildings to create both shade and shelter from the tropical rains as well as large roofed verandas for decent protection from sun and rain.

Sensitive and outstanding

In the garden, tropical foliage abounds, featuring a mixture of palms, variegated pandanas (including new dwarf varieties), Moses in the basket (usually sold as rhoeo but now called Tradescantia spathacea), heliconias and much more. The bulk of the garden is about a year old, but the rampant growth in the tropics makes it look much more established. The peripheral plantings of taller palms are about three years old but to people from Perth or Sydney, the growth is dazzling.

Further information

For more details on this Tropical Balinese Garden see the article by Don Burke in the November 1998 issue of the Burke’s Backyard magazine, pages 46-48.