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When Fleur Harris and her family moved into their 1908 home in Melbourne’s inner north west five years ago, the garden was unremarkable and overgrown with weeds.
But a single photograph, shared by the previous owner, revealed what had once been: a lush, cottage-style garden lovingly maintained by his mother decades earlier. This image became a quiet guiding light.
As Fleur began clearing weeds and nurturing the garden, dormant plants slowly reemerged, hidden beneath years of neglect.
‘It felt like uncovering a memory,’ she says.
Following a major renovation of the house in 2023, Fleur invited garden designer Ashley James to help reimagine the front garden and side way.
Their collaboration began organically — a friendship sparked on Instagram and fuelled by a shared visual language.
‘I was instantly drawn to Fleur’s work,’ Ashley says. ‘It felt like her paintings and my gardens were speaking the same language.’
Rather than formal plans and presentations, the design process unfolded organically over cups of tea at Fleur’s kitchen table.
The brief was simple but poetic; a garden that felt magical and immersive, a place to wander, pick flowers, and truly interact with. And, because her design studio looks out over this space, it also needed to nurture creativity and inspire Fleur’s artwork.
Sitting on an inner-suburban block of 580 square metres, the front garden is modest in size, but it has been carefully designed to feel abundant, without overwhelming the home.
A solid bluestone path leads directly to the front door, grounding the garden and paying homage to the home’s history. From there, the mood softens. Organic bluestone steppers weave through the plantings, looping through a series of little garden rooms. These winding paths are enveloped with Dichondra repens (kidney weed), forming a lush green carpet that blurs the line between hardscape and planting.
A former cracked bitumen sideway has been transformed into a secret garden laneway, connecting the front and back gardens via a narrow but joyful passage thick with greenery.
‘We didn’t let its size limit us,’ Fleur says. ‘It feels like a hidden path you might stumble upon by accident.’
Layered in and around the garden paths is a romantic palette of cottage-style perennials, chosen to create fullness and seasonal change without tipping into chaos.
‘It’s about balance,’ Ashley explains. ‘Enough height and softness to feel abundant, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming.’
Fleur, ever experimental, adds her own layer of spontaneity, scattering flower seeds and allowing plants to self-select where they thrive.
Personal stories are woven throughout the planting. Each year, Fleur grows heirloom poppies originally from her family home, planted long ago by her late father. Their fleeting, breathtaking blooms are a ritual of remembrance she looks forward to each season.
Small, whimsical details — like a tiny fairy apothecary hidden among the foliage — echo the imaginative world of Fleur’s illustrations. In fact, her Garden of Dreams wallpaper is composed entirely of flowers illustrated from the front garden.
Despite a strong focus on enchantment and whimsy, practical considerations were not overlooked. Melbourne’s increasingly hot summers posed a challenge for Fleur’s preferred cottage-style plantings, so an underground irrigation system running on tank water was installed to help maintain the garden.
With its most recent stage having been planted in February 2025, the garden is already settling in beautifully.
For Ashley, the magic of this garden stems from its collaborative beginnings.
‘When an artist and a garden designer speak the same language, magic happens,’ he says. ‘It’s like stepping straight into one of Fleur’s paintings; soft, layered, nostalgic and very much alive. This garden was built like a story, and shaped by a friendship.’
An edited version of this story originally appeared in The Design Files Magazine Issue 04. Subscribe to the biannual print magazine here.
