How to make a small suburban garden, and the surrounding street, a truly magical space, with Superbloom’s Jac Semmler

In the middle of suburbia, Super Bloom’s founder Jac Semmler has created a floral wonderland that spills out on to the street. Words: Georgina Reid, Photographs: Caitlin Atkinson

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Published: Tuesday, 10 September 2024 at 06:00 AM

Six years ago it might have been possible for a plant lover to drive past the red-brick house on the corner block in Melbourne’s southern suburb of Frankston without causing a traffic incident. Low brick
fence, neatly mowed grass verge, front lawn bordered by clipped shrubs: nothing to see here. But then, in 2019, Jac Semmler and her partner Matt moved in. The front lawn was soon ripped up, the concrete slab suffocating the backyard broken up, and in came the plants. Thousands of plants. Now, it’s impossible to miss.

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Jac is one of the most enthusiastic plant people you’ll ever meet. She’s a qualified horticulturist and educator, and founder of Super Bloom, which brings horticultural expertise to projects ranging in scale from residential gardens to art installations and public domain projects. She’s also written two books, Super Bloom and The Super Bloom Handbook, and has a third on the way.

Neighbours of all backgrounds really love the garden, and often have very insightful observations about it.

Given her penchant for plants, and childhood spent in rambling country gardens, 400 square metres of soil was never going to be enough. But true to her nature, Jac sees the size constraint as an opportunity.
“I’m really interested in creating landscapes where plants are the main event,” she says. “This property, with its open spaces at the front and back, has allowed us to explore naturalistic planting on a suburban scale.”

The back, dry garden is not watered past establishment and features a mix of endemic and exotic species, such as Podolepis jaceoides, Calandrinia grandiflora, Verbena officinalis ‘Bampton’, tall Digitalis lanata ‘Café Crème’ and Dianthus deltoides ‘Brilliant’. © Caitlin Atkinson

Jac began at the front, experimenting with what she describes as “a big block planting” – her interpretation of what an Australian perennial garden might look like. It’s a blousy, full planting, and the
only area of the garden which is fed with compost and irrigated in summer. Tall, gangly limbs of several cultivars of smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria) and tree poppy (Bocconia frutescens) frame and shade
the house in summer, while Australian wildflowers, bulbs and perennials create seasonal interest.

Garden bath with potted plants
Small as her garden is, Jac has still managed to squeeze in an outdoor bath behind the potting shed dominated by broad-leaved Farfugium japonicum, which enjoys the sheltered location, as does the chocolate vine (Akebia quinata). ©Caitlin Atkinson

Moving through a gravel courtyard, under a pergola dripping with glory vine, and past the outdoor bath and potting shed, Jac is trialling a dry, dynamic planting. “I’m not quite sure how else to describe Australian naturalistic planting,” she says. “It’s naturalistic, but it’s for a dry summer and it responds to where we are, using a lot of indigenous wildflowers.”

Through the garden, we can take clients and collaborators on a journey around what’s possible.

It was inevitable that Jac’s garden would eventually spill out on to the verge. “I wanted to test more dry, rain-fed plant mixes and didn’t have the room,” she explains. “It was initially about space. I feel like I’m gardening now more for the community.” The verge garden has become beloved by locals and visitors from afar, and the conversations provoked by it continue to shape Jac’s work. “It’s busted a lot of my assumptions around what the public want,” she says.

“Six years ago, I would have said that while I like a messy garden, my neighbours won’t, because I don’t see any examples around surrounding me. But neighbours of all backgrounds really love the garden, and often have very insightful observations about it.” Many, she says, are on flower watch: “They might be the first person to see something has started flowering, or changing. They like the complexity and the flux.”

Garden path leading to small potting shed
The narrow path to Jac’s potting shed is lined with an eclectic and colourful mix of plants including kniphofias, salvias and the rust-coloured Achillea ‘Feuerland’ while potted Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii at the door add an exotic touch. ©Caitlin Atkinson

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The gardens, within and beyond the boundary, play an integral role in Jac’s professional life. They’re a living lab, in which she’s constantly testing new plants, planting combinations and management techniques. In the verge gardens, for example, she’s testing layered plant mixes consisting of Australian shrubs combined with grasses, drought-tolerant perennials and bulbs.

Garden fence and tree with borders
Jac uses the street plantings to test new plant combinations and care methods. Here low-growing Nepeta ‘Prussian Blue’, grows alongside Australian native Lithotoma axillaris, Pelargonium ‘Graveolens’, Papaver ‘Flanders Field’ and the delicate pink flowers of Clarkia unguiculata.

Floral borders
Some might see a tight budget as a constraint, but Jac sees it as an opportunity. She re-uses existing materials, such as the pavers in this path through plantings of Delphinium ‘Blue Sensation’ and Achillea ‘Feuerland’, and propagates around half of the plants herself. ©Caitlin Atkinson

Jac applies the lessons she’s learned from her own garden to those she designs for others. “The style of planting we’re doing at the moment is quite unique in Australia because it’s not a replication of what naturalism is in the Northern Hemisphere,” she says. “Through the garden, we can take clients and collaborators on a journey around what’s possible.”

Floral garden
A narrow pathway finished with local pea gravel leads through the front garden. A low hedge of Euonymus ‘Tom Thumb’ frames plantings that includes the exotic-looking plume poppy (Macleaya cordata).

For Jac, “the garden means everything”. Not only is it essential to her work, it’s a place of deep meaning – connecting both present and past, personal and professional. Rose pelargoniums from her grandmother’s garden and bearded iris from her aunty jostle with an ever-expanding cast of plants to test, propagate and observe. It’s a beautiful merging of life and work.

Yellow garden bench
Jac’s partner Matt built the sunshine-yellow picnic table, a colour Jac loves. “It’s such an iconic Australian plant colour,” she says. Climbing up the nearby pergola is the grape vine (Vitis labrusca ‘Concord’) and a Japanese persimmon (Diospyros kaki ‘Fuyu’), which provides fruit in late autumn.

Jac’s design tips for small-space gardening

Scale is key when it comes to small-scale naturalistic planting, according to Jac. She suggests using arrangements of smaller plants, allowing for “the repetition, the big sweeps and the drifts of plants in your field of vision” while also maintaining a sense of diversity and openness. “It feels expansive,” she says, “not this thing pressing in on you and you can’t move around.”

Somewhat counterintuitively, Jac also suggests filling the space with plants and keeping hardscape to a minimum. “Too often, I see a lot of small gardens where the plants end up being edge confetti – a big table at the centre and planting only on the outskirts – while you could actually have planting right through and then just have a little seat or table within it.”

Woman stood in garden
Horticulturist and author Jac Semmler in the suburban garden she’s named Heartland. Her first home garden, it’s become a real plantsperson’s paradise in just five short years.

Recently, Jac did a project in a tiny courtyard using naturalistic planting principles in five large pots. “Using small species, such as bulbs, herbaceous perennials or Australian wildflowers you’ll have different things emerging at different points in time. You might not have a massive drift, or a massive peak of colour, but you’ve got little smattering fireworks throughout the year, all these little complex moments.”

In brief