Winter Series Lecture: Susan McKinnon

Presentation: Practical Approaches to Garden Design

Speaker: Susan McKinnon

There has never been a time when looking at and growing plants has not been a part of Susan McKinnon’s life. As a teenager in Brisbane, Susan started collecting and propagating ferns and herbs at her large family home full of tropical and temperate plants, encouraged by her keen gardener parents and grandparents.

A Fine Art degree opened her eyes to visual language, colour, balance, shape and texture, which has helped her to develop a keen sense of spatial design and visual structure.

Moving to Melbourne in the early 1990’s, Susan discovered a whole new world of herbaceous, deciduous plants and her obsession with learning botanical latin and plant identification, took off on another level.

Settling in Hobart in 1997 to a large, empty block happily coincided with the emergence of the New Perennial movement coming out of Europe and some key books by Piet Oudolf, Noel Kingsbury and Beth Chatto opened her eyes to using herbaceous perennials and ornamental grasses in a flowing, naturalistic style, with an emphasis on texture and seasonal change.

Many years of collecting plants from specialist mail-order nurseries and learning to combine them in her own garden, has developed a deep sense of naturalistic planting design and plant knowledge.

A Diploma in Garden Design and Cert III in Horticulture, has formalised her years of observation and learning from gardening, reading and visiting gardens into a busy garden design practice where she now helps people achieve beautiful, individual gardens that sit perfectly in their environment, brining both biodiversity and joy to the many creatures that live in them, including the humans!