It was 1970 when Diane Cummins decided to build a house in Doncaster East. Merchant Builders had constructed the place over the road and the firm was starting work on the nearby Winter Park. Ellis Stones' ideas about Australian plants, rocks and quiet informality were in the air.
But Cummins and her then husband used a different architect and went down the camellia and azalea route. While their brown-brick house integrates the garden from every room and has a similar aesthetic to Merchant Builders' homes, the couple planted a lawn, weeping peaches and silver birches.
Where the house over the road was largely hidden from the street with a bush-inspired garden composed of different levels, rocks and native plants, Cummins' garden was more of a mixed bag. She chose the exotics she had not been able to grow when she lived in Perth and kept the weeds that flourished in her clay soil, because they made the garden feel more bountiful and green.
But, little by little, she started to prefer the over-the-road garden. The over-the-road owner lent her a book by Stones, and then Cummins began reading texts by Diana Snape, Bill Molyneux, Rodger and Gwen Elliot and others. Before long, she had planted a blue gum in her front yard.
More than 40 years on, Cummins' garden is predominantly native - and where it is not native, it is mostly productive. The large lawn has long gone and most of her early choices with it. Granitic sand paths weave between hakeas, grevilleas, spyridiums, indigoferas, bossiaeas, eremophilas, lomandras - the list goes on. She has a "prickly corner" containing Acacia verticillata and other spiky offerings, while spilling down to the footpath is Acacia glaucoptera and, in several pots by the front door, the pendulous Acacia cognata. Two Allocasuarina torulosa hide a neighbouring house but allow the light through at the same time and nearby is the red-flowering Grevillea longistyla and the yellow-flowing Pomaderris lanigera.
While she has specimens hailing from around the country, Cummins mostly buys indigenous plants, as tube stock, from local volunteer nurseries. She says she wants "more than a piece of ground filled with plants" and works to create habitats for insects, birds, frogs and lizards.
Cummins steps into the garden and finds hours disappear. She has come to prefer working in the garden to travelling overseas or going to the cinema.
As well as caring for her natives, she keeps chickens, makes mulch and grows food. Each week she collects several kilograms of coffee grounds from a cafe to add to her compost.
The chooks and the compost tumblers are in the back garden, where Cummins' brother has made her walls from local bluestone. He also made her raised vegetable beds with recycled timbers, while herbs are growing in pots and fruit trees weave between Australian plants and the remaining exotic ornamentals.
Cummins is not one to remove a plant, no matter that she now has problems with the way, for example, light "bounces off" the glossy leaves of camellias or how the Virginia creeper clamours over a fence in the backyard. But she will not encourage them either. "I am not a plant vandal, but they get no water, they get nothing. If they survive that, they can stay and then when they die, they can be replaced with something more appropriate."
Cummins has two rainwater tanks and waters her natives only until they are established. Otherwise, the water is for productive plants. Cummins has not used chemicals, but having almost lost some trees last year, she is planning to spray her peach for leaf curl and her quinces for codling moth.
The garden is an ever-evolving space that charts Cummins' different phases over 44 years. If she was starting afresh now, it would be a very different garden. "But mistakes not withstanding, it gives me a lot of pleasure," she says. "I like gardens to be interesting and to feel organic … I want this to look as if it is owned and used by someone who loves it."
Cummins' garden, 4 Mowbray Court, Doncaster East, is open (with Open Gardens Australia) from 10am to 4.30pm today and tomorrow, $7.