Landscaping on the Gold Coast

I

Designing a landscape plan

A Bunnings guide to designing a landscape plan starts with considering preferences and priorities. It suggests writing down what matters most, whether that is growing food or a space for family gatherings, and it calls the areas that result "zones". As a starting point the guide offers four of them: growing, resting, eating and playing, and it suggests jotting them down.

Once those areas are settled, the guide turns to the site. It advises noting the features a design has to work around, such as a shed, a clothesline or existing trees, and the conditions, among them where the sun rises and sets, where neighbours are, which way the wind blows and how much road noise reaches the garden. The guide compares the zones of a garden to the rooms of a house, and it suggests checking with the local council about permit requirements before work starts.

II

Ground cover, plants and water

The guide lists ground cover options that include grass, mulch, decking, pebbles, pavers and artificial turf, and asks how their textures and colours will sit together. It also weighs function, giving the example of play mulch where children are, grass for children and pets, and hard surfaces such as pavers, decking or concrete around a barbecue, a fire pit or a pizza oven.

The guide names water drainage and irrigation systems as one of the most important factors to consider. The guide advises grading so water flows away from plants instead of pooling around their roots, and notes that irrigation systems cut down on maintenance. Rain catchments and grey water tanks are named as other ways to collect water. On planting, it weighs weather, local climate, soil quality and how much upkeep a gardener will take on, mentioning perennials and evergreen trees for low maintenance, non-toxic plants such as spider plants or camellias around children and pets, and vegie patches or herb gardens for cooks. It also suggests finding out how big a plant grows and spacing them for that size.

III

Features, views and the surrounding landscape

The guide describes "borrowed landscape", a technique it traces to traditional East Asian garden design: existing views or nearby trees are drawn into the plan so a garden feels larger and more varied. It suggests taller plants at the back, medium ones in the middle and shorter ones at the front, and thinking about how much privacy a tree will eventually give, or whether it will screen powerlines. Feature areas, a bench or a fountain among them, are covered as ways to add variety to a design, and the guide suggests choosing an option to fit your aesthetic and budget.

IV

About Gold Coast

The area is the ancestral home of clans of the Yugambeh people, among them the Kombumerri, Mununjali and Wangerriburra. Europeans came in 1823, when the explorer John Oxley explored the Tweed River, and timber from the hinterland drew people to the area in the middle of the 19th century. Nerang was surveyed and became a base for that industry, with a town reserve set aside by 1870, and in 1875 a settlement on the Nerang River, called Nerang Heads, was surveyed and renamed Southport.

The region grew after the Surfers Paradise Hotel opened in the late 1920s. It had been known as the South Coast, and the nickname "Gold Coast" came into use from 1950, when property and other goods and services were seen as over-inflated; locals at first treated the name as derogatory. The Town of South Coast became the Town of Gold Coast in October 1958 and was proclaimed a city in May 1959. A first high-rise followed in 1960, the 1980s brought skyscrapers and a tourism boom, an era defined by "white-shoe brigade" developers, neon lights and organised crime, and the city hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2018.