Home to Paradise with Earth Creation Landscapes
Pete Goodlet discovers the simple pleasures to be found in outside excursions.
When you are in Noosa it really is possible to come home to paradise.
Noosa – the place of pristine sweeping beaches, stunning coastal homes, and lush landscapes. With its sunny days, warm nights, and plentiful rainfall it is the ideal place to create an oasis at home. For as much as we love getting out and about and enjoying everything the Noosa lifestyle has to offer there is no place like home to drop your guard, drop your fig leaf and relax.
Gardens are known to be good for both your physical and mental health with time out in your garden helping to lower blood pressure and stress levels. Therefore, it should be a place you love and ache to return too. It is your haven.
But havens do not happen by accident they are created by design, hard work, determination, and imagination. In a well-designed and executed garden there will be no eyesores, no bare patches and lots of eye-catching beauty.
Once achieved rather than looking at your garden as a constant source of ‘must do’s’ and ‘maybe one days’, you can just enjoy admiring its beauty.
Let us start from inside your home. This is a great place to begin your garden design journey. Sit or stand in your favourite spot and note what brings you pleasure and what really gets your goat.
That could possibly be the old goats Beryl and Bob next door tanning their much-exposed leather hides to perfection. If so, emergency screening measures are called for. All the better if they fully obscure all the bits and ‘Bobs’ on view.
Hardwood strapping fence extensions are getting better and better and offer total block out and relief!
Once the immediate threat to your retinas is dealt with and the rest of your fence is painted nice and dark, you can then build on that with screening planting. In narrow areas this could be
as simple as adding sturdy trellis and growing a Star Jasmine: Trachelospermum jasminoides or a Mandevilla such as the Aloha series for that full on burst of subtropical colour. In deeper garden beds you start with a tall layer of lush clumping bamboos or tall evergreen shrubs to form your backdrop and work out from there.
Now is the time to consider feature plants such as Elephant Ears: Alocasia macrorrhiza or the colourful cordylines.
Where will you place your feature tree to provide both beauty and shade? Let’s splash about some flowering shrubs for the birds and bees, after all this is Eden, we are creating. A place of living, loving, and playing for all creatures great and small.
When it comes to playing in your garden nothing really beats a pool, but if you don’t have the space or the budget for a pool, a spa can offer year-round enjoyment and relaxation.
When positioning your pool always take in aspect, sunshine and access from your house. The quicker you can shed the layers and plunge into its watery depths the more you will use your garden’s biggest asset.
Privacy is also a big consideration of pool positioning and screening in your landscape. You want to be able to drop the fig leaf without causing coronaries to nosy neighbours with vivid imaginations.
An outdoor shower is an affordable and useful splash of luxury in your garden and a luxury if you can add hot and cold water – it’s rather bracing and refreshing if you don’t! Blend it into the garden with hardwood screening and natural stone paving. On a very hot day, a quick splash under the shower can transport you back to the days of sunshine, kids and running through sprinklers. Bliss!
Bench seats in the garden are also the perfect spot to find your bliss – a good cushion, favourite book, and a G&T and you are set for the day. Even better if they can be a tad secluded from that rabble inhabiting the rest of the house.
Now speaking of beauty in the garden, Stuart and the crew at Earth Creation Landscapes are the masters of bliss. They can turn your dreams of paradise into reality. Let them get all hot and sweaty as you just sit back, admire, and reap the rewards. Must be paradise!
