Garden

A Garden based on Wildness

Gardens represent the ultimate control of nature by humans. Gardens reflect the driving desire for people to control, change manipulate to create beds of flowering beauty. Such order pleases the human eye.

Such controlled order doesn’t exist in the wild and the garden at Moon Mountain has taken its inspiration from the wild ecosystem on the Sunshine Coast.

Who does a garden exist for? The human inhabitants or the wildlife in all its living forms? A garden for humans relies on order, mass plantings, weed eradication, swathes of water hungry lawns. An English parkland or cottage garden springs to mind.

None of that had appealed to Lynn and Ron. Take a walk on the wild side and a different possibility emerges. In the different ecosystems of the Sunshine Coast, the wallum, rainforests, wetlands, sclerophyll forest form a cacophony of chaos to the human eye. Yet, there is order as the plants form a complex interplay of life. We just have to think of gardens beyond the traditional view.

The garden Moon Mountain exists for the wildlife and to be a safe haven for plants under threat from the expanding urban areas. The plants are planted and then allowed to sort out their own patterns of existence. There is no order based on formal beds, there is no controlling plants that expand their territory. Nor are caterpillars and bugs removed from the garden. Garden beds are overplanted to form closed canopies.

The consequence is a garden where wildness rules. The birds, reptiles and mammals have responded to a garden that fulfills their needs. Providing food, shelter and nesting hollows for all the wildlife is the guiding principle of garden design at Moon Mountain.

We have brought the wildlife back to our home and the sharing of life simply adds a dimension of beauty to our garden. Wildness determines our garden design.