A garden is an extension of your home, a living canvas that reflects your lifestyle and sense of beauty. Botanic Horticulture understands that outdoor spaces need thoughtful, well-executed softscaping to bring them to life.
Whether you’re seeking a change in the look and feel of your garden, correcting issues from a poorly executed planting scheme, or starting with a blank canvas, our experienced team can help you bring splendour and vitality into your landscape.
Softscaping includes all the living elements of your garden: trees, shrubs, ground covers, turf, seasonal plantings, and soil improvements. It’s the finishing layer that provides colour, texture, and seasonal interest. Often, our horticulturists are called upon for:
Aesthetic updates: You may want to modernise your garden or bring more cohesion to a tired space.
Poor planting results: Sometimes previous plant choices don’t thrive, are competing for nutrients as the garden grows, or require more maintenance than expected.
Mismatch between design and delivery: We’ve seen projects where landscapers veer away from the original vision, leaving designers and clients disappointed.
Softscape-only support: If you’ve already got your hard landscaping complete, we can step in to install or refresh the planting and finishing touches.
Working in Partnership with Designers
At Botanic, we pride ourselves on working collaboratively with landscape designers, ensuring their vision is fully realised. Softscaping can make or break a design, so we take great care to understand and honour every planting plan and design intent, whether we’re simply implementing or adapting on the fly.
Precision Planting in Essendon
A recent project in Essendon saw us brought in to install the softscaping for a detailed designer garden. The hard landscaping had been completed by another contractor, and the designer had a clear vision for a contemporary, layered planting palette with strong seasonal interest and structure.
Our role was to interpret the designer’s detailed planting plans, source high-quality, mature stock that matched the brief, prepare the soil to suit the plant selection and ensure long-term health, and plant with precision to preserve spacing, sightlines, and form.
The result was a seamless transition from hardscape to lush, considered planting exactly as the designer had imagined.
BEFORE: Entry garden.
AFTER: Entry garden.
Garden Makeover in Newton
In contrast, a Botanic client in Newton approached us to refresh the front garden they inherited from their parents. In this case, there was no specific design, just a desire to modernise the softscaping and work with Robinson Landscapes to create a new layout by streamlining the main path from the front of the property to the back.
Our team conducted a site assessment and consultation, developed a bespoke garden concept that retained and enhanced some of the mature trees with new underplanting and cloud pruning, transplanted others, and filled the beds with a new plant palette including Murraya paniculata, Asparagus densiflora, clusters of Ligularia reniformis, Convolvulus sebaceous and a covering of Viola hederacea.
This transformation brought instant street appeal and created a welcoming, cohesive planting scheme that has evolved beautifully over time.
BEFORE: Garden path.
AFTER: Garden path.
One job led to another
In this instance, the father of the Newton client called upon Botanic to softscape around the newly constructed driveway, tennis court and playhouse. The brief was to create something to soften these areas that required little maintenance.
Botanic Horticulture curated a garden concept that included a line of Pear trees to provide definition and seasonal interest, balls of Teucrium and Westringia for structure in the understory softened by Miscanthus ornamental grass, and a creeping Ficus pumila on the retaining wall.
BEFORE: Garden bed flanking stairs.
AFTER: Garden bed flanking stairs.
Botanic General Manager, Paul Smith explains, “We’re not just about planting. We’re about purposeful, well-executed softscaping that ties a garden together. Whether you have a full garden design in hand or just know your outdoor space needs a lift, Botanic Horticulture love a softscaping project.”
Irrigation is a vital component of any softscaping project. Our horticulturists are skilled at tailoring irrigation systems to suit your garden’s specific needs selecting between drip lines or sprays and designing zones to optimise water efficiency and support healthy plant growth.
If you’re ready to reimagine your softscape or need help bringing a garden design to life, get in touch with our team.