A Constructed Landscape in the Wine Country
Set in the heart of the Hunter Valley wine region at Pokolbin, New South Wales, Hunter Valley Gardens is less a single structure than a curated geography. Across fourteen hectares it gathers ten individually themed gardens, threaded together by eight kilometres of wheelchair-accessible path. Opened in October 2003 by Premier Bob Carr after construction began in 1999, it stands as the largest display garden in the Southern Hemisphere — the realised ambition of founders Bill and Imelda Roche, built by a team of forty to fifty landscape gardeners, engineers and architects.
Reading the plan. The design works as a sequence of borrowed places. The Border Garden imitates the classic French Parterre, its box hedging clipped against Hill’s weeping figs, with hand-carved Indian marble water features and statues of the four seasons. The Chinese Garden is entered across green slate through a Moon gate flanked by two bronze temple guardians; the Indian Garden through 160-year-old antique gates and a pair of bronze elephants. Each threshold is deliberate, a change of register from one world to the next.
Material and Water
Material choice carries the theming. Korean velvet grass mounds over rock in the Oriental Garden, where a two-storey Japanese pagoda sits within a koi pond. The Italian Grotto centres on a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, hemmed by wisteria, bougainvillea and citrus. Water recurs as structure: the Sunken Garden falls ten metres in a waterfall topped by a pergola, while the Lakes Walk lines a kilometre and a half of waterway with perennial borders and a rotunda — a favoured setting for the weddings the gardens host.
The wishing fountain. The wishing impulse is modest but present. A wishing fountain stands in the Formal Garden — one of the largest of its type in Australia, bordered by Manchurian pears and 3,000 chameleon roses — and, fittingly for a place built as a gift to future generations, all its proceeds are donated to charity. There is no ancient well or inherited legend here; the coin tossed is simply pressed into service for a contemporary good.
A Garden as Authorship
Personal signature closes the reading. The Rose Garden is shaped as a corkscrew in homage to the neighbouring vineyards, and at its centre stand thirteen bronzes of Imelda Roche and her twelve grandchildren — a maker’s portrait set, quietly, at the heart of the design.
New South Wales, Australia · Built: 2003