Gardening in one place you can really deep dive into all those tiny observations throughout the day. I love having a garden as a canvas for living," says horticulturalist, gardener and flower lover Linda Ross.
Before she settled down with her family in Catherine Hill Bay, Ross spent decades employed by a luxury garden travel company, where she explored famous gardens across the world. It gave her a sense of place and a big world view, enabling her to create authentic landscapes.
She was living in Sydney in 2008 when she happened to pass through Catherine Hill Bay. Her husband had a beer at the Catho Pub, and they drove through the town.
She fell in love with its cottages, finding one in particular on Flowers Drive.
It felt like a sign.
The property is next to 350 hectares of Wallarah National Park, windswept and untouched.
At the time, her daughter, Melaleuca, was three months old, and the cottage was surrounded by melaleuca trees. Ross says now, every year on her birthday, the whole forest flowers.
"This little house, all it needed was love and devotion, and now my daughter's 15 and plays guitar and sings at the pub, and is a dish pig on the weekend," Ross says.
Before COVID, it was a weekender for them, a beach shack where friends and family would often stay.
But Ross could tell that change was coming, even before the pandemic arrived.
"I could feel things happening in January before COVID. I said 'let's all move to Catherine Hill Bay'," she says
"I could see it was all spiralling downwards."
The historic house was built in 1803, and they took out the old non-heritage items.
They kept the original frame and floorboards and one old weatherboard wall.
It's been a passion project that's given her a lovely new home away from Sydney.
"We found this beautiful, authentic sense of community and sense of place," she says.
"Now I've really loved creating new relationships with Lake Mac and Novocastrian friends."
They moved up and haven't looked back. It worked well for her husband, who is a keen surfer.
She designed the quarter acre block garden 15 years ago. When they first moved in, there was not one tree. Now the whole garden has been carved out. She did the driveway and the outdoor bathroom; it all eventually clicked into place from the serpentine grass pathway, the wild flower patches.
"It's unpretentious but full of flowers and my kind of colour scheme. I like moody burgundy black purple scheme, the colours of the beach, the foamy waves, the dark sea, the night sky. I like to create the mood," she says.
She's taken elements of the nearby park and brought that into the garden. She has lots of banksias and flannel flowers, which she's loved since she was a child. She grew 68 varieties of dahlias during the pandemic and gave them away. She doesn't grow food but she does try to be organic and sustainable; she wants to coexist with nature. Her garden has many blue wrens and wattle birds. She has plenty of bird baths, and she plants things that the birds will love.
"The older I get the more important I think it is to create a haven for wildlife. The blue wrens can nest in the garden. I get beautiful eastern spinebills. They're absolutely tiny with a long black bill and chestnut little breast. They drink from salvias and banksias," she says.
She has quite a few blue tongue lizards and a huge diamond python, 2.5 meters long. She lives in the shed, coexisting with everybody, and they haven't seen a rat since she arrived eight months ago.
"She just curled up in the rafters, and the kids love her; she looks like a pair of snakeskin boots," Ross says.
When Ross isn't in her own garden, she's designing other gardens in the region. She currently has about 16 garden design jobs going, and she also just joined ABC Newcastle as the gardening presenter. She's a busy woman with all her gardening gigs, but she also knows how important it is to stop and smell the roses.
