‘It’s not formal anymore, and we don’t do highly fashionable’: Legendary landscaper Paul Bangay faces the future of garden design
Australia’s most celebrated landscaper reflects on his biggest achievements in a 40-year-career.
Growing up on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne with its mix of suburban blocks and large acreages, landscape designer Paul Bangay was enchanted and intrigued by the eight-hectare estate next door.
He had free rein to roam in this vast fantasy playground, complete with Edwardian mansion, stables and chauffeur’s cottage.
“I grew up in there. It had a big veggie garden, they had goats, they had all these sorts of things, and I just felt at ease with that scale,” he says.
Those early years of exploring and experimenting quite literally planted the seed for a love of expansive and captivating country gardens. It’s a passion that grew into a successful 40-year career, both here in Australia and overseas.
In his latest book, Big Garden Design: The Making of Beautiful Country Gardens, Bangay showcases 17 of his most treasured large-scale projects. From grand gardens in France to a forest grown from saplings, and projects incorporating lakes, walled gardens and private oases, Bangay shares the design process, as well as garden plans and extensive planting lists in the epic coffee-table book.
Wish Magazine’s design issue is out Friday October 4. Inside your copy of The Australian.
“I think it was sort of embedded in me because that was my childhood,” he explains. “I’ve loved big gardens and designing big gardens; you just get freedom. You don’t get neighbours looking down on you. You don’t have councils telling you what to do. You just get this lovely sense of scale and the freedom that you can design on a large scale.”
The biggest garden in terms of size, expense and time is the first garden featured in the book. Coastal Garden on the Mornington Peninsula spans more than 15.4 hectares and features 52,659 plants.
Bangay describes it as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” because of the freedom to design on such a grand scale without space limitations, and the ability to incorporate panoramic views of Western Port Bay.
“It was a paddock, and we decided to put a garden back into a native forest. So, we had to actually create the native forest, which was a wonderful thing to do,” he says.
“The scale was unbelievable. It went on for six or seven years and it was just an absolute joy to do.”
In stark contrast, and illustrating the diversity of Bangay’s talents and portfolio, is the Château Garden in France’s Loire Valley.
He recalls the brief as “a designer’s dream” with a 19th-century château and half a hectare of relatively untouched garden with which to work.
“We had a client, she came on one of our garden tours that we do at our place [Bangay and husband Barry McNeill’s country home, Stonefields, near Daylesford, Victoria] and she said, ‘Would you like to create a garden in a three-acre walled garden in the Loire Valley?’.”
“It was a pretty fabulous project. It’s definitely one of our favourites. It had this lovely 300-year-old stone wall around it. She wanted a massive vegetable garden, a big flower garden. I like the challenge of going to different places; it’s quite exciting.”
Bangay, who is renowned for the balance and symmetry of his widely admired gardens, says his style has evolved over the years.
“I like to think we’re changing and we’re evolving. We’re adapting and we’re site specific, as much as possible. I’ve been doing it for 40 years and I think the reason why you have longevity in this industry is that you do keep evolving,” he says.
“We’re not doing what we did in the 1980s, it’s not formal anymore. It’s a lot softer. It’s a lot wilder. It’s a lot more relaxed.”
Native plants are emerging increasingly in Bangay’s designs – not only because he has a personal affinity for them, but because more clients are asking to incorporate them in order to attract birds and butterflies.
“Ever since I was a little kid, my mother was big into the native plant movement. We’re using more and more natives now all the time and we’re using a lot more native plants within even our small gardens and medium-sized gardens,” he says.
“If you didn’t have a knowledge of plants, you probably wouldn’t be able to pick they’re native, but they are. That’s the wonderful thing. The plant palette is becoming sort of bombarded with native plants used in different ways, and we love that.”
Bangay says he particularly enjoys working on country gardens because of the place they hold in the hearts of their owners.
“I think with country gardens, people tend to stay in them for longer. If you’re creating a big country garden, they tend to talk about it being intergenerational, you know – ‘We’re doing this for the kids or the grandkids. We’re going to be here forever’. [With] city places, they turn over. I like the longevity that people associate with country gardens.”
There is also a greater sense of connection and hospitality with the clients who commission them.
“The country gardens are my favourite because you get asked back all the time. And country hospitality is much better than in the city,” says Bangay with a smile. “In the city, you go to the appointment, you get the hour and then you go. Up there you get lunch, you get morning tea, you get to sit in the garden, you get to talk about it; it’s a whole day. Which is wonderful. I get to go back to those a lot more than I would see the city gardens.”
Bangay’s personal country gardens include the 20-hectare Stonefields estate and a quaint quarter-acre home in the lush landscape of England’s Cotswolds.
“We’re in a very quiet part of the Cotswolds,” he says. “There’s the A417 [a main road] that goes right down the middle of the Cotswolds, and people like the Jeremy Clarksons are on one side with all the posh Londoners with lots of money. On our side, it’s like the old farmers who have come in, and the old villages are still very much intact,” he says.
“I like it because our house is 500 years old. We go down off the road to this little valley and it’s like stepping back in time. Honestly. Everyone just walks. There are no cars, everyone just rides horses around. It’s like you belong to another era when you’re there. Everyone’s friendly. I used to ride when I was a kid, now I’ve got a friend who has horses, and I ride every afternoon and it’s just bucolic peace.”
Bangay turns 61 in December and shows no signs of slowing down, overseeing up to 60 landscape design projects in progress at any given time.
“All the garden designers I worshipped worked until their eighties. In the Cotswolds, there’s an old man next door to us and he was a farmer. He moved into our little village, and every single day I see him charge up to his allotment at the top of the hill and he works in the vegetable garden all day. I just think that’s my idea of old life. If you can do that, it’s a dream.”
Big Garden Design: The Making of Beautiful Country Gardens (Thames & Hudson, $90).
