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About Steve Hailstone

I love beauty - beautiful sounds, tastes, smells, textures and sights. I also enjoy the beauty of something well made, functional and easy to live with.  I get great satisfaction working with people and the environment, so creating beautiful gardens for other people to enjoy is, in my view, just about as good as life gets!

I grew up with gardening all around me.  Several generations before me on both sides were enthusiastic gardeners.  In my youth, while friends worked in petrol stations and supermarkets, I gardened for pocket money.  At 20 years of age I started work for Marshall Green Landscaping where most of the work was large scale commercial, civil and civic projects.  It taught me a lot of technical and construction skills. The owners, Rob Marshall and Philip Green (both now retired) were exemplary role models with the highest of business ethics.  They also taught me the importance of being organised and of maintaining clear and frequent communication with everyone involved in a project, especially the client.

In 1980 I started my own business and have been designing and building gardens ever since.

For a number of years, in partnership with Mark Barnett, (now of Mark Barnett Gardens) our business employed design, construction and maintenance crews, and together we built and cared for the gardens we designed.  The Landscape Industry Association awarded us Landscape Project of the Year for the gardens of Sir Ben & Lady Dickinson, and then Olivet House, in addition to 13 other design and construction awards.

Since January 1997 I have been working solo, contracting trades-people and artisans as needed project by project. This enables me to be flexible and to give real focus to each client’s particular needs.

 

Influences on my design process come from many sources.

I learnt the technical side of design (line, form, shape, colour, etc) from my mother, Pam Hailstone, who has written a book on garden design.

In 1989 I received a Rotary Group Study Exchange scholarship to Japan, meeting Japanese landscapers and gardeners.

I studied Permaculture Design with David Holmgren, completed a landscape design “master class” with Martha Schwarz, and finished the Educator Training programme in Holistic Management in 2002.

As a flow-on from that training, I spent 5 months of 2004 as an “intern cow-boy” on the Howell Ranch high in the Colorado Rockies, where sound management of livestock is actually improving the environment, not just minimizing the damage.  More...

Inspirations has a list of books which continue to inspire me and includes links to the above “mentors”.

Follow the Our Place link for a detailed look at my own garden and small farm, Niwajiri. It is an example of how I approach garden design and development.

The people I work with and the services I offer:

I work with people who want to enjoy their garden, and contractors and artisans who take pride and care in their work.

The garden may be a tiny courtyard, a suburban block, a few acres on the urban fringe or around a country homestead.  It may be for a restaurant, accommodation, wine tasting rooms, or a main street.  You may want to be closely involved in either or both the design and building processes or you may prefer to be largely hands-off.

I am happy to help in any way you would like, offering my professional services and 30+ year’s experience; anything from an hour or so consulting, through to full design, specification, costing, project management and eventually maintenance advice.

If you want to really enjoy your garden and make it a part of your life, I’d like to work with you to achieve that.

Call me on 0418 822 212 or email me on steve@hailstonegardendesign.com