Gardens of WA: Sara Wordsworth’s English style garden and cottage has thrived against the odds

Rolling hills, grassy meadows, pastoral views, roses blooming, bees buzzing and tall, stately hollyhocks waving in the wind.

If this bucolic scene doesn’t really sound like suburban West Australian living, I’m not surprised.

It doesn’t exactly jive with the agaves, birds of paradise and Mondo grass we’ve come to expect from the typical Perth garden. And yet, maybe those dreams of a rambling English cottage scene aren’t pie in the sky at all.

Just take a look at Sara Wordsworth’s front yard. She may not have the rolling hills and grassy meadows, but her garden has everything else.

“You try to make an environment that you want to be in,” Sara says, surveying her blooming, buzzing, overflowing garden. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the country. I don’t want to live in a city environment … so I’ve made my own country.”

Bordered by a white picket fence, Sara’s garden beds are wide and generous, filled with huge cottage garden shrubs: spiky echiums, monstrous (and beautiful) giant honey flowers (Melianthus major), roses in every shade of pink, Verbena bonariensis blooming on tall, spindly stems, frothy purple ageratums, salvias, cosmos, Queen Anne’s lace, foxgloves, comfrey, asters, and a collection of cottage garden perennials so unusual I am predictably consumed with gardener’s envy.

“I like filling everything. If they say put a rose three feet apart, I put it two feet apart,” Sara chuckles. Her method works. The packed beds are a riot of colour, alive with bees from two beehives she keeps in a bed by the front veranda.

This garden has been a labour of love over the past 34 years, but Sara has not done it alone.

The garden is a collaboration between herself and David, a horticulturalist and gardener who has worked with her on her gardens for decades.

“David has been with me for 37 years, he’s an integral part,” Sara said.

Together, they have created a cottage garden that thrives, despite our hot, dry climate and sandy soils.

Sara’s secret to healthy soil is, I’m pleased to discover, exactly like mine. “I get clay and work it into the soil,” she explained.

“For 30-something years I’ve put manure on and lupin mulch — you keep doing it every year. When the spring flush is over, I’ll do it again”.

She is rewarded for her consistency with a garden that truly looks as though it has been plucked from the English countryside, with a degree of beautiful chaos that can only be achieved by a gardener who knows when to step back and let nature do its thing.

After years of soil cultivation, most of Sara’s annual plants are now self-sown from last year’s blooms, carried by the wind, or birds, or thrown by Sara onto bare patches of earth and allowed to grow wherever they please.

The effect is a garden that gives its visitors the magical feeling of having just stumbled upon a secret wildflower meadow, existing somehow — miraculously — in the heart of the suburbs.