A Home Called Hillyards Gardens

Hillyards Gardens began as a deliberate project — established as a hub for education, a living stock garden for future land, and a passive food production system operating within a highly diverse landscape. From the outset, the focus was placed on trials with rare species, experiments, and combinations of plant guilds: testing how species interact, which groupings reinforce one another, and how systems perform across seasons and conditions. Conceived both as a collection of ongoing experiments and as a source of propagation material, the site prioritised long-term behaviour, resilience, and function over short-term harvests.

Over the last seven years, it has become many things at once: a place to live alongside plants, a diverse food source, a testing ground, and a shared learning space — a landscape to move through, explore, and experiment within.

Hillyards Gardens was established in March 2020 without a fixed master plan. Rather than imposing a final design, the site evolved through continuous observation, adjustment, and response. Plants were introduced gradually and assessed in real conditions — soil type, exposure, moisture, competition, and seasonal stress all informed where species remained, moved, or were phased out.

Selection was functional rather than aesthetic. Some species were retained for their ability to build soil structure, activate biological life, or stabilise degraded ground. Others proved valuable for their resilience under exposed conditions, while some were trialled specifically for future propagation and replication elsewhere. Over time, plants were repositioned as their strengths and limitations became clear, allowing the landscape to organise itself through use rather than instruction.

As density increased, attention shifted from individual plants to relationships between them. Guilds emerged through layering, root interaction, shade, and water movement. These combinations revealed patterns that could not be planned in isolation — showing how diversity distributes risk, how complexity creates stability, and how productivity often emerges indirectly as systems mature.