Barwon Heads
Barwon Heads
A garden rebuilt around a new house at Barwon Heads, on the Bellarine Peninsula, backing onto the Thirteenth Beach golf course, for a retired couple who wanted a garden for family, children and grandchildren that their elderly parents could enjoy too, with more privacy on a corner site open to two streets. The house by Neil Architecture, finished in 2020, replaced an earlier one on a modest footprint so the old landscape could stay: a coast banksia, a willow myrtle, an arbutus, a flowering plum and a lemon tree were kept, and the owners asked for the old fashioned scheme to be brought up to date rather than erased.
Kate Seddon's planting mixes natives and exotics for a coastal feel that suits the architecture: elaeagnus, correa, teucrium, westringia and philotheca for solid form, with agastache, miscanthus, tussock grass, beschorneria and gymea lily for movement and catching light, under hakea, acacia, jacaranda and banksia. The materials are local and coastal, weathered timber, paving in tan and gold, and gravel. The board formed concrete wall in the picture is part of the architects' hard landscaping, not the planting designer's; Lovely by Nature built the landscape and Morgan Home Builders the house. The Design Files published the garden in June 2025, and Kate Seddon Landscape Design publishes it as Barwon Heads.
Kate Seddon Landscape Design
Kate Seddon Landscape Design is a Melbourne practice based in Windsor, directed by Kate Seddon, designing gardens in city, country and coastal settings.
Landscape design @kateseddon_landscapedesign. Photography @blachford. Seen via @thedesignfiles.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.