Shape a Garden That Feels Meaningful and Deeply Your Own
There’s a lot of gardening info out there, but Field Notes is a little different to the rest; it’s a friendly conversation, and a gathering of thoughtful and creative garden ideas gleaned over Colleen's 30+ years of garden making and art practice. Regardless of where you are gardening, the principles and ideas shared within Field Notes can inspire your garden making path.
Downloadable Guides
1. Making a Perennial Garden
Field Notes - Making a Perennial Garden, comprises 62 full colour pages filled with information to guide the design and planning of an abundant perennial garden filled with life, colour and texture. It includes a planting plan reflective of one of Colleen's own perennial beds.
2. Favourite Go-To Perennials
Field Notes - Favourite Go-To Perennials comprises 106 full colour pages filled with information about my favourite foundation perennials - those steadfast plants I can’t live without, and that form the basis of my perennial gardens.
3. Making a Garden with Sculpted Plants
Field Notes - Making a garden With Sculpted Plants digs into the creative and practical thinking behind gardening with hedges and topiary. It includes 80 full colour pages filled with notes, illustrations and photos, exploring the ways I have used clipped forms in my home garden, and ideas for incorporating them into your own.
4. The Gardener's Creative Palette
Field Notes - The Gardener’s Creative Palette digs into the creative and practical thinking behind garden composition, and those special garden vignettes that draw our attention. It includes 58 full colour pages filled with notes, illustrations and photos, exploring some of my favourite garden compositions in my home garden, the ideas behind their planting, and the creative techniques I have used to compose them.
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About
Colleen Southwell
Underpinning The Garden Curator is Colleen’s ever evolving path as a garden maker. She gently draws on her background in horticulture and landscape design in both her art practice, and in the making of her own country garden. She is an advocate of “slow gardening” - this doesn’t mean lazy gardening, rather mindful enjoyment and acknowledgement of the garden as a process, not an outcome, and gardening as a partnership, not a conquest.
Hand-made, home-made and heartfilled.
The thoughtful gardener sees their role as one of caretaker, custodian and curator.
“The best garden making is a creative and storytelling process. My own family garden in the rolling hills of the Central Tablelands of NSW is filled with the plants we love, those that have been gifted, shared, propagated and raised by seed. It is slow, constantly evolving and wears its heart firmly on its sleeve. It’s imperfect, but I have no intention for it to be otherwise; my interest rests in how the garden feels, involves all senses, and engages with every creature with whom we share it. The most beautiful and resonant garden has a character that is rooted in far more than aesthetics - it’s storytelling, treads lightly on the landscape, and evolves to show the gentle hand of its maker.
My hope it that through the sharing of my garden path, others will be encouraged to embrace the true joys and rewards of gardening and the natural world.”