We love gardens! We love your garden, whatever size, style or setting, if it’s a natural space we love it. Whether it’s been professionally designed, newly landscaped, is a mature and established garden or is just an outside space in need of care; we can provide everything your garden needs. Our goal is to fulfill your gardens potential within today’s increasingly extreme climate, providing strategies to negotiate drought, erratic temperatures and unpredictable conditions. Gardens are living, breathing, fluid spaces that need much more than just ‘maintenance’, which often means just keeping things tidy. Instead, at ABH, we provide a comprehensive approach to improve the overall health of the garden through soil conditioning and protection, the correct management of water and appropriate plant selection with the aim of creating beautiful, sustainable and resilient gardens that ultimately require less maintenance. With ABH managing your garden you can be assured that we will constantly strive to meet all of its aesthetic, functional and developmental requirements through our maintenance services. As the seasons and years pass we will clarify a vision with you of how you would like your garden to develop, working towards this within the confines of your budget and your gardens maintenance schedules. At ABH we are inspired and excited by gardens the world over. Constantly finding ourselves admiring the timeless elegance of traditional gardens, invigorated by fresh interpretations of landscape and enthralled by new combinations of old ideas so that we may bring to your garden all that it may require to fulfill your vision. So you can be assured that we love your garden already. About Us Tali Allen has been working in the industry for over 16 years. After working in privately owned gardens from the early nineties Tali studied horticulture in1997 at Holmesglen, Melbourne graduating with distinction. He then moved into public gardens working in the City of Stonnington on their significant gardens. In 2000 he became Head Gardener of the St. Kilda Botanic Gardens, famous for its Alistair Clark Memorial Rose Garden, and forged a strong network of community support and involvement within the gardens. After a sojourn in Hobart, Tasmania, in late 2003 working in the stock garden of a wholesale nursery, Tali returned to Melbourne to work in Natural Resource Management around the bayside area with a company called Naturelinks. Here he gained a deep understanding of indigenous plants and their role within their associated eco-systems. From the middle of 2004 Tali moved back into the private garden industry and started managing the garden maintenance division of Van Leeuwen Green Horticultural Services, caring for a large number of domestic and commercial properties. Their client base tripled under his stewardship. At the end of 2006 Tali moved to Sydney for 18 months to work with Frank Verheyden at Outer Space Landscapes. Here he managed and worked in a number of exclusive private gardens and commercial landscapes in the eastern suburbs and the lower north shore. Tali returned to Melbourne, after spending six months exploring the parks, gardens and wild spaces of Europe, to establish Aleister Branwen Horticulture in August 2008. Our Services GARDEN MAINTENANCE The core of our business is the care and maintenance of gardens and outside spaces. From domestic gardens to commercial properties to public open space, the services we provide range from programmed maintenance to garden restoration and garden renovation to specialized garden development. At Aleister Branwen Horticulture our approach to gardening for our clients is very inclusive. As obvious as this sounds there are many companies out there who impose a style of garden with little regard for their client, their house or the place in the surrounding landscape their garden occupies; often just implanting a garden according to current trends without considering the needs of the client both functionally and aesthetically as well as the architecture of their house, let alone the subtle aspects the wider landscape brings into the garden. We aim to include the client, the house and the place in the development of their garden. After many years of working in both the private and public domains with a number of organizations in Melbourne and Sydney it has became clear that a strong opportunity existed to create a horticultural business model with a range of services specifically centered around the client and their garden or outside space. With this in mind we work with the client to provide assistance in clarifying what they require from their garden and what options are available in the development of their garden towards their ‘vision’ or ideal garden. Forming a vision with the client is the first step in achieving the garden they desire. Informing the client of the possibilities and opportunities in their garden is the next step, where we tailor a specific works schedule, which may range from anywhere between an annual visit to an intensive service of weekly visits, with many domestic gardens falling into fortnightly or monthly visits. As a guide there are three general levels of service requested for by our clients, often dictated by budgetary constraints, which we describe as essential, comprehensive and intensive services. The essential service provides a straightforward level of care that on top of keeping the garden healthy and in shape aims to work, with every visit, towards the clients ideal garden whether its conditioning the soil to improve resilience or fixing/upgrading basic infrastructure such as irrigation systems or garden edges. The comprehensive service is an expansion of the essential service and may be more appropriate for properties that cover a larger area, have gardens and lawns fed by rainwater tank or a grey water system, have a heritage status upon them or may simply demand greater attention due to botanic or aesthetic value. Such gardens generally need longer visits, often at fortnightly intervals, with a closer level of horticultural care to maintain their high standard. The intensive service is reserved for gardens of an exceptional quality requiring care that is extremely thorough and diligent. They may contain rare and interesting plant collections, be of a unique and beautiful design, be on important commercial property representing a corporate image or simply have owners who are extremely proud of their gardens and want only the best for them. All our levels of service are flexible and tailored to individual gardens and the requirements of their owners, indeed clients are free to move between these levels as circumstance dictates. GARDEN RENOVATION & RESTORATION There are many gardens that have been adversely affected by the drought and our extreme weather, including those that have been neglected since the introduction of water restrictions, which have made it increasingly difficult to support gardens designed before the drought around inappropriate plant selection. This doesn’t mean we can’t still have the gardens we desire, we simply need to adapt through the utilization of alternative water sources (such as rainwater and grey water), appropriate plant selection and the use of soil improvement and protection techniques. Our garden renovation service clears up a tired garden, retaining the plants and features the client wants kept and that have remained strong, and then planning towards the client’s vision of what they want from the garden, working within our principles of sustainability, resilience and beauty. Garden restoration can be a more complex enterprise especially when a garden has become overgrown or degraded beyond recognition. If there is some record of the original garden the task is made easier. With today’s conditions however restorations may not be able to be absolutely true to the original garden, even if a consistent alternative water source can be guaranteed, gardens with delicate plant species will fry under our increasingly scorching summer temperatures. The horticultural industry these days has at its disposal such a large range of plants that we can adapt to these current conditions by using alternative species to similar effect in the spirit of the original garden design. Aleister Branwen Horticulture provides all the information a client needs to restore a garden as close to its original beauty as possible. Some gardens may initially need a large amount of work to make the transition from drought sensitive to drought tolerant. A well designed garden using appropriate plant selection in healthy soils, once established, may actually require less maintenance. No matter what the style or type of garden this is one of our fundamental goals: a healthy, beautiful and sustainable garden. SPECIALISED GARDENS Aleister Branwen Horticulture is experienced in developing many specialized gardens including: Vegetable/Productive Garden Indigenous Garden Succulent Garden Indigenous/Native Formal Gardens Balcony/Courtyard Garden Indoor/Atrium Garden For more information about the best services for your needs or to organise an appointment - just give us a call!