Castlemaine Dry Garden
Castlemaine
A naturalistic dry garden wrapped around a newly finished rammed earth house in Castlemaine, the old gold mining town in central Victoria, on ground the designer describes as mining rubble and clay, with winter lows near minus four, summer highs in the high forties and about 600 millimetres of rain a year arriving in heavy dumps between long dry spells. The client had just completed the build and wanted a garden to match it. Kaya Storm of Synergy Stone designed and installed the hard landscaping, including a dry creek bed in the backyard to carry away the downpours, and Tim Pilgrim Gardens was brought in for the planting, to settle the house and its paths into the site.
The planting is natives and tough herbaceous perennials mixed for a soft meadow effect, with flowering crepe myrtles as an overstory to shade the house in summer and let the light in over winter: lavender, Russian sage, achillea, golden marguerite and Jerusalem sage, and what the designer calls the light catchers, gauras, poa, reed grasses and fescues. The wall in the picture is the house's rammed earth. The practice publishes the garden as Castlemaine Dry Garden.
Tim Pilgrim Gardens
Tim Pilgrim Gardens is a small garden design practice in Central Victoria led by Tim Pilgrim, known for naturalistic cottage style gardens that blend the traditional and the modern, the edible and the ornamental. Pilgrim trained in horticulture and worked at the Diggers Club's Garden of St Erth and with Paul Bangay before starting his own practice.
Tim Pilgrim Gardens (@t.p_gardens). Also tagged @simong9 and @synergy_stone.
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.