A family affair

Speak to most green-fingered people and you’ll soon hear of a parent or grandparent who passed on their love of gardening: a greenhouse overflowing with begonias, a rambling country garden, a productive suburban vegetable patch – gardens are threads connecting people, plants and place over generations.

Rarely, though, are all four members of the one immediate family horticulturists, like garden designer Jo Ferguson, her husband Simon Hazel and their two sons Rupert and Tucker. Their home garden at Flinders, on the Mornington Peninsula southeast of Melbourne, Australia, is a shared labour of love.

Situated on an 18-acre property rolling gently towards the Southern Ocean, work on the garden began in 2016, when Jo and husband Simon reunited after some years apart. When they first bought the property, the garden consisted of a lawn, an olive tree and a few scattered shrubs. They initially discussed knocking down the 1970s brick-veneer house and starting again, but instead, they engaged an architect to undertake alterations and additions, and began engulfing the structure with garden. Jo drew lines on the ground, defining pathways and structure, and Simon jumped on his digger and sculpted the land in a day. While the form of the space came together quickly, the meaning of the garden has been shaped over decades.

Jo’s interest as a garden designer lies in creating healing spaces that nurture both people and places. When designing her home garden, she asked herself and her husband questions such as: “Where did you feel most joy when you were a child? Where did you go when you were sad?” Simon found respite in vegetable gardens, bees and flowers as a young child at boarding school. For Jo, happiness was walking barefoot, having spent her childhood summers “running wild on the foreshore” at a nearby beach. She’s also always been drawn to grasslands, this connection forming during a family trip to central Australia, spending time with Indigenous people living on thei