The goal of this website is to give visitors a strong sense of your unique approach to designing places and spaces. It'll make you easy to recommend, verifying you as the right fit for the clients you want and filtering out clients who don't align with your approach.
You design diverse, plant-driven landscapes with a focus on climate compatibility and resilience. Your best clients come to you because they want to be surprised, and the jobs you rate most are the collaborative ones — with architects, craftspeople, growers, and the crews who tend the work after you've left.
“Twisting trunks and vines and the tannins from fallen leaves will make their mark as much as you do. We are creating what is unique and intrinsic to a place, not perfection.”Your words
I also got a good sense of where the frictions are for you. Instagram is currently leading to low quality enquiries and the best ones currently arrive through architects. But with them you're often brought in too late, after the budget's stretched and the damaging site works are done.
Great work arrives through established partners, architects, past clients, someone who stood in one of your gardens. They come with a sense of what you do, half decided before they reach out. Same for anyone your own channels bring in, now or later: if they came from Instagram, press or something you published, they've already seen the work. We are not trying to reach a stranger googling “landscape designer Melbourne”.
So the site has three jobs: confirm, filter, and act as a referral vehicle.
When a referral looks you up, the site confirms you're the real thing in seconds. When the wrong fit lands on it, they work out it's not for them before they cost you a site visit. And when someone wants to recommend you, it's one link that sums the whole practice up.
“The website should be something that confirms I am good at what I do and helps people figure out if we are aligned.”Your words. This is the brief.
Instead of a generic contact page, I want your site to bend to the types of enquiries you get. There will be three doors through which people can enquire — so whoever reaches you already knows how you work. Section 06 shows how the enquiry form actually does this sorting.
The architect-adjacent client. Asked early whether an architect or builder is involved, and shown why bringing you in early protects the site and the budget.
No house project — the garden is the project. Keen to do something interesting and ready to invest in a living thing.
“Gardens are for everyone” — honoured without discounting your fees. Routed to the free resource and the paid consult: real value, properly priced.
The status-symbol client and the quote-shopper will read the same pages and rule themselves out — the design does that filtering for you.
You named the two ends of the cringe spectrum better than I could. The site sits in the middle ground you described, and it shows that position through how it's written and built rather than claiming it. It won't say “down to earth” anywhere. It'll just sound like you talking about what you know and love.
The commodity end. Tidy, insured, no surprises — gardens farmed out one after another for the walk-past-on-the-way-to-the-couch crowd.
“Quality landscaping, guaranteed.”Frank, grounded, practical, and serious about what the work can do. Pride in craft. Credit shared with the growers, makers and crews who make it possible.
Every line passes the “would she say it at dinner” test.The impenetrable end. Genius-brand opacity, priced for rivalry, allergic to detail or credit.
“Experiential places of intangible memory.”The work will come first on the site but your thinking, voice and sensibility will be behind it — and people should be able to get a sense of you without cringe personal branding.
I think we should lean away from individual project pages. You don't have heaps of completed projects and these can be overly verbose. Instead I'm thinking one flowing landing page leading through six to ten of your strongest built moments. Each gets its own section — one, two or three strong images, either a full-bleed hero or a small collage — with a "Project details" tab in the corner you hover or click to reveal the details, insights and your thinking. That way you get the best of both worlds: portfolio credibility, without an archive you'd have to keep feeding.
This follows your own rule — land somewhere appealing, with a clear path, never hunting for the next page. It also does the filtering: a few captions in, people can tell what kind of designer you are.
It's also designed for the phone first. Most people will meet this site from Instagram or a link someone sent them, so it has to work as well in a thumb-scroll as on a big screen.
6–10 annotated moments, sequenced like a walk — not a grid.
Trails down the page; opens the brief builder in place.
Genuinely useful, yours, in exchange for an email.
Short, earned, you at work — after the work has spoken.
The packaged first step; longer engagements quoted from there.
The about page will include four short movements, three to five hundred words in total, with photographs that point to you and your process between them. Here we'll give people a sense of what you do and the worldview behind the work. We'll also indicate how you like to work with clients, there was a lot of good writing about this in your discovery document. Also pointing to your industry standing via MIFGS 2025 with the Royal Botanic Gardens and Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung, and the people you build with.
| Movement | Weight | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| What you do | ~30–50 words | The plain version. No manifesto. |
| The worldview | ~120–180 words | The heart — custodianship, interconnection, place. |
| How you work | ~120–180 words | Sets expectations; doubles as a filter. |
| Standing | ~30–60 words | MIFGS, collaborators — the architect-legible line. |
I'll show you the register I mean at the meeting — a page where writing and photographs take turns, and nothing is rushed.
Your instinct about a packaged first step is right, and the website will build the path around it. The steps run: a free resource that's genuinely useful and generous, it could even help people prepare for the consult, a paid consult that values your time, then the full engagement.
A useful, sendable thing in exchange for an email. Serves the smaller-budget visitor honestly, and starts a list you own.
Your idea, packaged: you walk their space and read it aloud — soil, levels, light, aspect, what was there before — then follow with a written summary. Bookable, priced, real value on its own.
Design and beyond, quoted properly. By this point they know how you work, and you know their ground.
As they answer, their words assemble into a brief addressed to you, and each answer shapes the next question. As they write answers the brief builds visually for them and then by the end they've written you the perfect enquiry: the project, where it is, how they live, budget posture, timeline, and why you. It opens by asking which of the three doors they're standing at and forks from there.
Dear Suzannah — we're renovating in Northcote, working with an architect, and the garden matters to us because . We'd describe our budget as and we came to you because we stood in a garden of yours in autumn …
We'll also give people the option to just send you a normal email too.
Booking stays on your terms. How you work and how your fees are structured go on the site in plain language, so the call starts further along. But the call comes from a request, not a calendar link — your weeks stay fluid, and you keep the phone call where you get a read on their personality.
When a project wraps, you send your client a single link asking them a few questions for example what they were worried about, what changed, what they'd tell a friend. Their answer is then turned into a review you can use, with their sign-off. It's the same engine as the enquiry form, pointed the other way. Your best channel is word-of-mouth, and this gives people something concrete to pass on.
The free resource should be one thing, done well. Here are five candidates just to jog your thinking and spark some ideas. We can discuss further.
A field guide to seeing your own site the way you do — light, levels, the path the water takes, soil, what was there before. It's your consult in miniature: whoever reads it knows exactly what the paid visit is worth.
What to protect and decide before the builders arrive — the order of works, the trees and soil that can't be un-wrecked. Speaks straight to the brought-in-late problem, and architects would forward it.
The honest anatomy of a landscape budget — where the money goes, why plants and craft cost what they do, how staging lets a garden evolve. It does the budget-filtering for you, and it's generous rather than gatekeeping.
How to live with a new garden: what to watch, when to water, when to resist tidying. It extends your “handover is a beginning” idea into something people keep.
The ambitious one: an interactive web of plants and what they feed — birds, insects, soil, each other. Extraordinary if built; probably a second-year move once the site is earning.
This works because the material already exists: your words, Nathan's photographs, my direction and website build. For everything on your side you'll get clear briefs and word limits from me — the To-dos tab turns this split into a working checklist.
Process photography. The good build-in-progress shots don't exist yet. One habit fixes it: shoot as builds begin. That fills the gap, feeds new annotations, and gives Instagram a signal that finally matches the work.
You, at work. The About needs you on site — hands in the dirt, reading a space. A small planned shoot; I'll art-direct.
The decisions from the room become the build brief. It's the Read you're looking at — and the To-dos beside it.
You write to the envelopes, Nathan shoots and grades, I design. The To-dos tab keeps us honest.
Built, refined with you, and ready for the architect networking you're about to start — a portfolio you never have to assemble again.
The decisions from our meeting, turned into a checklist. Your part is first, then Nathan's, then mine. Dates are what we're aiming for so nothing stalls — a guide, not a deadline to stress over. If any don't work for you, just say and we'll move them.
Everything for the build lives in one Drive folder — Website build — your uploads. Inside it: a folder each for images and About material, and two docs to write straight into — captions and About — with the prompts already in them. All linked on the tasks below. The consult you can just send me however's easiest.