A Garden and a House

This is "Ballarat Gardens in Spring" weekend. Several private gardens are open, and today I visited a very green one:

Not many flowers:

But a lot of green:

These large European trees must provide welcome shade in summer. The whole garden must be like an oasis when all the surrounding paddocks dry up. But I like to see more flowers in a garden. There were a couple of roses, and in summer the agapanthus and acanthus will be be in flower. There were several spots of newly-mown bluebells which must have looked pretty under the trees a month or so ago. But this garden is really not about flowers.

Somewhere between there and our next stop, we came across this:

This house was designed by our architect about 3 years ago. I'd seen the picture below, taken when it was newly-built:

But I'd never seen the actual house before, or known just where it was. It was lovely to see that the house is now settling into the landscape. There are lots of native shrubs close to it, and the owners have done a lot of new planting recently:

I hope in a couple of years our house will be settling into its surroundings in the same way.