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Gregg Chapman’s Garden Don visited Gregg Chapman, landscape designer, and Nicole Faulkner, landscape architect, at their home in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. They have transformed a dull and uninteresting garden into a beautifully designed, stylish garden...
Melbourne Apartment Gardens Courtyards adjoining tall buildings can be very difficult to landscape. There are often wind tunnels between the buildings; some areas bake in fierce reflected heat from the hard surfaces, while other areas are in full shade. Don looked at...
Melbourne Topiary Don visited the gardens of two expert topiarists, John Mircello and Peter Nguyen. John’s Italian background is evident when you look at his beautiful garden. He has been topiarising plants for around ten years, and spends much of his spare time...
For the last five years or so, weekends have been very special for Fairfield businessman Aldo Pecora. Every Sunday he rises at the crack of dawn, goes outside and begins work on his hobby. Aldo is an expert topiarist, and spends hours carefully trimming and pruning...
Caroline and Jack Linschoten are passionate about Bali, where they’ve had many wonderful holidays over the past ten years. They’ve brought back everything from woodcarvings and candlestick holders through to masks, handmade furniture and stone statues....
Olives Many Australians picture the beautiful olive groves throughout Mediterranean areas such as Spain, Italy and Greece, and dream of planting olives and making a fortune. Australia does have the potential to develop a successful olive industry, but there are some...
Kitchen Vegie Garden The son of a female convict, William Charles Wentworth was born in New South Wales in 1790. He became famous in 1813 when, along with Gregory Blaxland and Lieutenant William Lawson, he found a way across the Blue Mountains. This discovery gave the...
Pruning Grevilleas Grevilleas are by far the most popular flowering Australian native plant grown in gardens today, which is hardly surprising when you consider that they attract native birds and many of them flower for most of the year. The only problem is that...
Weird Carrots Don reached into the Burke’s Backyard mailbag and pulled out two interesting letters from viewers with problems growing vegetables. Both gardeners enclosed photographs of twisted, bizarre-looking carrots. Carrots need a light, well-drained soil,...
Wood Ash in the Garden Now that those chilly winter evenings are here, lots of people have been stoking up their slow combustion heaters or warming themselves in front of glowing open fireplaces. In fact many of those people have written in to Burke’s...