In Eltham, known as Nillumbik for thousands of years, meaning shallow roots / shallow earth. On the lands of the Wurundjeri-willam Custodians of the Kulin Nation.
There's a certain feeling you get walking through along Eltham gardens. Its like the bush just crept in and nobody stopped it. That's not an accident. It's mostly Gordon Ford's fault, in the best possible way.
Ford was a landscape designer working through the mid-twentieth century who decided that manicured European gardens had no business in Australia. Instead he worked with native plants, dry stone walls, boulders placed like they'd always been there, reflecting water features. His gardens were carefully made, so the goal wasn't entirely wilderness, but they were made to feel natural. The tension between craft and apparent effortlessness is something I find interesting.
His influence fused with Eltham's evolving character. Ford and Alistair Knox worked together on many projects, combining Knox's mudbrick houses with Ford's gardens, two collaborators with the general suspicion of anything too polished. It's what we now call the Eltham look. You feel it wandering the streets. Informal, rambling stonework, native plantings growing a little wild, the sense that the garden and the bush are in gentle conversation.
It's a philosophy that keeps returning. The idea that the most beautiful thing might already be there, and your job is mostly to get out of its way.
An Eltham example of how Ford and Knox worked together
