Secret gardens take root in Sydney

We don't often get a chance to peer behind the gates and into Sydney's best private gardens, so a book featuring 19 projects completed over the past 12 to 15 years by one of Sydney's leading garden design companies, Secret Gardens, is a treat.

Secret Gardens is one of several Sydney design companies that offer a full-circle service – design, installation and maintenance. "You can have a great design, but someone has to rear that garden for it to realise its potential," says Cantwell. The benefits of the approach are clear in the gardens shown in the book, also called Secret Gardens, which have a sense of grown-in solidity, having been not simply installed, but gardened. They are comprehensively photographed by Nicholas Watt so that you can see the cleverness of the designs, and also get a good look at the plants, how they have been put together, and how they complement the architecture of the house. Cantwell writes engagingly about the design process and how and why design choices were made.

Cantwell has always been interested in plants – when he was studying landscaping his favourite subjects were "drawing and plants" but in the gardens he was helping construct, there was precious little of either. When he established Secret Gardens in 1994, he wanted to do things differently, and employed a landscape architect to develop actual garden plans. "Few clients were interested in the design part of the process. They really wanted to see their money being spent on a guy wielding a mattock, rather than a pencil and paper."

The sophistication of attitudes to design is one of the big changes Cantwell has noticed over his years making gardens. Sydney homeowners have also changed how long they expect to be in gardens. Cantwell says that prior to the GFC, clients were looking for a garden that would add value to a property they expect to live in for a year or two before upgrading to a better house or better street or better suburb. "Everyone had a plan to scale up and there was a lack of focus on quality."

Now, he says, Secret Gardens is making gardens for people who have no plans to leave. For Cantwell, plant-lover from way back, the exciting aspect of this longer-term thinking is the opportunity for plant life. "We do deliver a relatively instant garden, but it really becomes interesting when the hedges start to grow together and the trees have scale and take on their natural shape and that takes four or five years. It's very satisfying to plant something and know it's not going to be ripped out by someone else three years later."

Secret Gardens by Matthew Cantwell is published New Holland at $59.99.