Open Gardens Victoria - La Colline

About this event

Overlooking the Harcourt Valley for more than a century, La Colline is a rambling country garden surrounding a beautifully restored 1917 weatherboard farmhouse. Developed over generations and carefully enhanced by its current owners, the garden is a place of productive landscapes, magnificent trees and dramatic granite outcrops.

Honouring Harcourt's famed fruit-growing history, food production remains at the heart of the garden. Extensive orchards of apples, pears, plums, peaches, nectarines, cherries, quinces and mulberries sit alongside citrus, pistachios, walnuts, almonds and pomegranates, while productive vegetable gardens featuring highly productive wicking beds.

Winding gravel paths invite visitors to explore the property, revealing seating areas that take advantage of sweeping valley views. Throughout the garden, granite boulders emerge naturally from the landscape, providing dramatic contrast to Mediterranean-inspired, water-wise plantings of succulents, pigface and cotyledons. In spring, bulbs, hellebores, roses, echiums and arthropodiums bring seasonal brightness to the garden.

Trees are a defining feature of La Colline. A striking avenue of over a hundred Chanticleer pear trees welcomes visitors on arrival, while maples, elms, ornamental pears and mature eucalypts provide year-round beauty and seasonal colour. Among the property's oldest residents are a towering yellow box, believed to be between 400 and 500 years old, and a magnificent black mulberry that recalls the district's nineteenth-century silk-growing past.