Installation
The Ecological Garden
A place-responsive ecological garden blending beauty, biodiversity, and resilience, designed to reconnect people with living systems.
View project ↗
Est. Mont Albert · Melbourne
Ecological gardens. Heirloom objects.
Living systems.
Gardener & Son is a Melbourne ecological design studio working across garden design, installation, heirloom objects and the systems that help living landscapes be seen, cared for and valued over time.
One practice, held together by ecology.
Gardens, objects and plants, each thread feeds the others. A single ecological culture, not a collection of services.
A gentle beginning
Every garden begins somewhere.
Starting a garden conversation can feel difficult — especially when you're not sure where to begin. We made a better way in.
Two or three minutes. A few questions and a couple of photos. No prep, no pressure. Just a clear first step.
Start Your Garden Design Journey →
01
What feels unfinished?
Tell us what the garden feels like right now — no wrong answers.
02
What is hoped for over time?
Retreat, habitat, gathering space, food, play — or simply transformation.
03
A glimpse of the garden
Two or three photos from your phone is enough. No staging needed.
04
Your Garden Path Snapshot
A clear, tailored first step — sent to you. A gentle next move, not a sales call.
"Most gardens change in stages. A first step can be small, affordable, and still meaningful."
Tyson — Studio Co-founderHow we work.
Every site is read before it is designed. Every material is chosen for honesty. Every garden is built to mature.
01
Begin on site
Design begins walking — reading slope, soil, light, and remnant pattern. Form emerges from context rather than being imposed upon it.
02
Favour continuity
Remnant vegetation, local geology, indigenous systems, and subtle cultural traces inform the work. We favour continuity over novelty.
03
Design to mature
Gardens are designed to grow over years. Season by season, they settle. Plants find rhythm. Soil deepens. What begins as structure becomes relationship.
04
Measure and document
Measurement and documentation sit beside intuition and artistry. Craft, integrity, and systemic beauty guide how we work — and how we record what we've made.
Gardens are not decorative backdrops.
They are fragments of a larger ecological whole.
Gardens
Ecological gardens built for beauty under real conditions: drought, shade, slope, clay, wind, pets, and family life.
Planting
The Sensory Garden
A garden designed to boost biodiversity and enhance biophilic responses whilst maximising real estate market appeal.
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Installation
The Resilient Garden
A forward-thinking garden designed to flourish for future generations.
Read story ↗
Heirloom
An imprint of Gardener & Son.
Visit Heirloom →
Things worth keeping.
Heirloom holds a curated collection of objects — pots, vessels, tools, references and material fragments — gathered with care, chosen for their beauty, uniqueness, style, patina and age. All vintage or rescued: things with a past, finding their next life in another garden.
Less a shop than a quiet way of thinking about what we keep, what we mend, and what we pass on. Objects that are useful, repairable, and beautiful in the way good things become beautiful — through use, time, and care.
Pots & Vessels
For planting, cuttings, propagation — chosen for patina and proportion.
Tools
For pruning, planting, observing — built to sharpen, mend and last.
References
Books and field guides that deepen practice over years.
Material Fragments
Stone, timber, fibre — things with a past, finding their next life.
Visit in person
Heirloom objects can be browsed and bought at both of our studios.
Each location holds its own changing collection of pots, vessels, tools and material fragments — different finds, different moods. Come in, take your time, take something home.
Plants of Place
An imprint of Gardener & Son.
How it fits the system
Local plants, grown for local ecological repair.
Plants of Place is the studio's indigenous micro-nursery — opening soon at Auburn Road, Hawthorn. Locally provenanced species, grown for the soils, rainfall, and light of the gardens they're going into.
Not only native plants, but plants of this place: chosen by Ecological Vegetation Class, sourced from local seed where possible, and matched to the conditions a Melbourne garden actually presents.
This is the living link between classification, design, and the garden in the ground.
Find My EVC → Find My Ecological Garden → Plants of Place → installed gardens → the Ecological Registry. One continuous chain from classification to verified outcome.
Enquire About Plants →Stories
Essays and field notes on ecological gardening, systems, and culture — written to clarify the work, not to decorate it.
Essay
What We Are Building This Year
Most gardens are treated as private spaces — personal, aesthetic, and disconnected from the larger systems around them. Yet collectively, gardens make up one of the largest untapped ecological assets in our cities.
NoteDesigning Interactions, Not Gardens
As part of our design process, we often think about how a garden and its stewards shape one another — how it guides movement, invites pause, and supports daily use over time.
EssayWhy Plant an Ecological Garden
Across Melbourne, more people are discovering that a beautiful garden can also be a living system. An ecological garden restores balance, supports biodiversity, and reconnects us to the natural rhythms of place.
The System
Infrastructure for private ecology.
Individual gardens matter — but systemic change requires infrastructure around them. Classification, translation, registry, incentives, and aggregation are the layers that make private ecological work visible, durable, and economically real.
01
Find My EVC
Classification — ecological context for an address. The first question: what once grew here?
findmyevc.com ↗
02
Find My Ecological Garden
Translation — plant assemblages matched to habitat and site conditions.
findmyecologicalgarden.com ↗
03
Plants of Place
Living layer — local-provenance plants supplied from the Hawthorn nursery.
Visit the nursery ↗
04
The Ecological Registry
Registry — baseline records, change over time, and verification pathways for ecological gardens.
ecologicalregistry.org ↗
05
YIELD
Incentive — mechanisms that reward ecological stewardship and return value to stewards.
06
Curbing
Aggregation — connecting many gardens into credible, city-scale ecological value.
Building the private ecological infrastructure layer for cities.
This requires more than gardens. It requires registry infrastructure and economic frameworks that can recognise, value, and connect private ecological work — without losing the craft and beauty of the garden itself.
This is the ecological economy: stewardship with proof, and restoration that can compound across neighbourhoods. Long-horizon work. Built steadily.
Contact
Start a conversation about your garden.
Email
hello@gardenerandson.com
Studios
Mont Albert — Retail Studio
2 Churchill Street, Mont Albert 3127
Hawthorn — Retail Studio
140 Auburn Road, Hawthorn 3122
Victoria, Australia
2 Churchill Street, Mont Albert 3127
Hawthorn — Retail Studio
140 Auburn Road, Hawthorn 3122
Victoria, Australia
Not sure where to start? Begin here →
2–3 minutes. A gentle first step. No pressure. Where Gardens Begin takes the difficulty out of making contact.
Building a garden
Ecological design + installation pathways for Melbourne.
Sourcing plants of place
Indigenous, locally provenanced plants from the Hawthorn nursery.
Building the system layer
Registry, measurement, incentives, and aggregation — for councils, partners, and collaborators.
Acknowledgement of Country
At Gardener & Son, we acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we live and work. We honour their enduring connection to Country — and the grasslands, woodlands, and wetlands that once flourished here through generations of care and balance. These living systems were not lost to time, but to disconnection. Our work seeks to rekindle that relationship, restoring native ecologies and weaving biodiversity back into the urban fabric — each garden a quiet act of remembrance and renewal.