GARDENING FOR MOUNTAIN GOATS
“The driveway is steep but you can turn at the top. Don’t stop halfway up or you’ll get stuck and, at the top, swing left to pull in front of the garage.” These are the instructions I give visitors to our home and garden.
Our north-facing quarter-acre block in the outer northeastern suburbs of Melbourne has a 33 per cent slope, roughly terraced into four main sections. We call it mountain-goat country.
When we bought the property six years ago, the “gardens” surrounding the 1980s home consisted only of towering gumtrees and a handful of poorly placed bottlebrushes. Areas of raised garden beds, which probably only came about when
