An extravagantly romantic garden set against the dramatic landscape of New South Wales

Situated above a vast river plain in rural Australia, Bloomfield feels a million miles from anywhere. Certainly, there is no sense that a refined house and garden might be around the corner as I bounce down a steep gravel track towards the Murrumbidgee River. When the handsome homestead eventually comes into view, sitting on a promontory of sorts, it hovers like a mirage above the raw landscape. During very wet winters, these same plains become a lake that wraps around the garden. This occasional but ‘utterly magical’ prospect was in mind when one of Australia’s leading landscape designers, Paul Bangay, set about reimagining a country garden for the property’s owners, who divide their time between Australia and the UK.

Paul’s career has spanned three decades and he has a prestigious client list in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Europe. His reputation for timeless, often grand gardens that respond intelligently to their site is the result of his ‘instinctive sense of proportion and scale’. He is known for his use of box – ‘I like architecture in a garden.’ But, in recent years, his style has softened and he has a new love of perennials. His own garden, Stonefields, above a forested valley in Victoria, brings together all he loves: the gardens of early twentieth-century Australian designer Edna Walling; Vita Sackville-West’s extravagantly romantic approach; and the vast scale of the Australian bush. There is plenty of clipped box, of course, deployed theatrically.

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Paul has an affinity for country gardens: ‘In Australia, there’s often a seemingly endless horizon, allowing a luxurious amount of freedom. The only limiting factors are your imagination and water supply.’ At Bloomfield, there is water from the river, but also very cold winters, frosty enough to hammer the westringia (native Australian rosemary), and extremely hot summers.

Designing the four-acre garden, Paul worked closely with its owner, a ‘passionate and educated gardener’. Though the original layout had been largely lost, there were some fine trees – oaks, walnuts and ancient river red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis). The arresting floodplain prospect and the position of two large oaks directed the new layout, which runs down a spine from the entrance past the house towards the distant river flats and flaxen hills.

‘We created a ha-ha, so that when you sit on the veranda and look over the main lawn beneath the oak, the garden appears to float in the landscape and, when it rains enough, to float on water,’ says Paul. Even on this hot, blustery day, the view is mesmerising; you can imagine arriving by boat to the little jetty, currently standing high and dry.

To one side of the house, a cutting garden sits behind a tapestry hedge of winter honeysuckle, hawthorn and Rosa rugosa. A central inlay of pebbles and reclaimed bricks marks beds stuffed with foxgloves, delphiniums, zinnias, hollyhocks, lupins and roses. A pool pavilion in the Australian vernacular with a pitched, corrugated-iron roof is one of many shady areas to relax. ‘We created layers of shade everywhere,’ says Paul. The family spends much of its time on a netted veranda. Once common in country houses, this wonderfully practical outdoor room offers protection from summer flies but catches the evening breeze.

From here, there is a view down the garden over serpentine herbaceous beds, where hand-clipped box and English lavender balls are interplanted with Salvia nemorosa, achillea, sedum, verbena, gaura and Geranium ‘Rozanne’. Paul originally designed straight borders, but softened them a little at the owner’s suggestion: ‘And she was right. Now the look is loose and luxurious, with a relaxed and meandering feel.’

Bloomfield may be impeccably designed but it remains at heart a country garden, well loved and unpretentious. So there is a washhouse and an old meat room (now used as a winter store for tender plants) and squabbling cockatoos drinking at the cattle trough. There is even an old-fashioned Hills Hoist rotary clothesline in the orchard. No self-respecting Australian country garden would be without one.

Paul Bangay: paulbangay.com