A Day in the Garden - Megan Morton's life at Mimosa Moon
There's a version of this story that goes: Sydney's most in-demand stylist trades the busy city for the quiet country. It's a neat story. It's also not quite Megan...
The truer version starts on a banana farm in Queensland, where a teenage Megan Morton grew up. She left for Sydney at eighteen, landed her first job at Dolly magazine, and spent the next two decades becoming one of the country's most recognisable interior stylists, shooting for Vogue Living, Elle Decoration UK, Vanity Fair, then building The School, a Sydney warehouse-turned-creative-hub where thousands of people learned to make things with their hands.
Photo Credit: Sam McAdam-Cooper
So when Megan tells you she's moved to a 150-acre farm in the Byron hinterland, cattle and all, it isn't really a departure. It's a beautiful homecoming.
Mimosa Moon
The farm is called Mimosa Moon, 150 acres at the foothills of Protesters Falls, deep in the New South Wales Northern Rivers hinterland, on Bundjalung Country. Megan didn't plan to fall in love with it. She describes the place, in her own words, as "both intoxicating and beautiful… both relentless and relaxing… both truth and beauty." It's the kind of description that those living on the land everywhere understand immediately.
Photo Credit: Rachel Kara
For Le Sac, this story is a personal one. Megan and our cofounder Sahra have worked together more than once over the years. The connection runs deeper than history, too: Sahra moved to a working cattle farm with her husband six years ago and Le Sac co-founder and Sahra's mother-in-law, Trisha, runs the most special private garden tours across Australia and abroad. Watching Megan build a chapter that draws both threads together, farm life, and a life spent guiding others to storied places… was one we couldn’t wait to share.
5:00 - 7:00am — Farm First
Depending on the season and what needs doing on the farm, by 5 am Megan can already be ready for morning tea.
There’s something rather telling in that.
Before emails, calls or Paris plans enter the picture, she has been outside and moving. The farm dictates its own timetable, and Megan has learnt to work with it rather than attempt to impose one of her own.
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7:00 - 9:00am — Family, Paris and Catching Up
By this point, Megan says she is already properly “in her body”.
A morning spent outside means there is little appetite for opening a fitness app simply for the sake of having exercised. The exercise has happened naturally in the doing.
Around 9 am, the wider world begins to creep in.
It is one of Megan’s favourite times to speak with her eldest daughter in Europe. Her son is usually too deep into his own day for a proper phone call, although, as Megan puts it, there is always time to send “a stupid meme or two”.
Then comes Paris.
Megan checks in with her team there, not only for the group trips she hosts in September but for the custom itineraries they arrange throughout the year for people travelling independently.
It requires coordination, local relationships and rather a lot of keeping one step ahead.
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9:00 - 12:00pm — Thinking Time
Megan calls this little stretch her thinking time.
It is a chance to sit with projects rather than immediately rush to finish them, to work through production problems and consider what might be waiting further down the road.
Photo Credit: Rachel Kara
It is here that the connection between three seemingly different parts of Megan’s life becomes especially clear.
Travel. Styling. Gardening.
All three are subject to things beyond your control. Plans change. Weather turns. Plants behave unexpectedly. Something that looked straightforward on paper proves otherwise once you are standing in front of it.
Photo Credit: Rachel Kara
Preparation matters, but so does optimism.
“You put the work in, prepare as well as you can, and hope things sort themselves out joyously.”
Sometimes, of course, they don’t.
Mimosa Moon itself carries all of this contradiction. Megan describes its garden as “wild, contained, weedy, tough, sensitive”.
Running 150 acres solo has allowed her to witness the place through every season, not simply at its most photogenic, but through the failures, disasters and harvests too.
For Megan, that has been part of the gift.
12:00 - 3:00 pm — The Meat in the Sandwich
“The meat in the sandwich,” as Megan calls it.
These are the hours for getting on with things.
When she is travelling, they often coincide with the time her guests are able to relax. At Mimosa Moon, they fall across the hottest part of the day, when outside work naturally slows.
That pause becomes useful.
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A stolen pocket in which Megan can get physically or mentally ahead before the day moves on again.
Food begins to enter the equation too.
She prefers eating early, not for intermittent fasting or anything remotely virtuous, she assures us, but because she becomes far too excited about what will be on the table.
Wherever she is in the world, a little mise en place usually begins.
3:00 - 5:00 pm — Making Time Work
Megan has become very good at finding extra hours where other people might not notice them.
She deliberately works late a couple of nights each week and has even arranged her business banking in Perth to make use of the time difference.
There are, she admits, quite a few little systems like this.
She hates wasting time.
But perhaps the interesting part is what all that efficiency is actually for.
Not to squeeze more endlessly into the day.
It gives her room for what she calls the stolen moments, the chance to sit, look across the farm and watch Mother Nature carry on entirely according to her own timetable.
No hacks. No dupes. No shortcuts.
And perhaps that is the quiet thread running through Megan’s whole day.
The outward life
If Mimosa Moon is Megan's inward life, her outward life still runs at full pace. Her business, The School, has evolved from Sydney workshops into a women-only travel venture, small, considered trips built around what she calls "particularly nuanced" points of view on places both over-visited and completely overlooked, shaped as much by the people who live there as by the landscape itself. Planned around the seasons, but never rigid. "Nimble, steadfast, and with deep roots in the places we love," as she puts it.
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Photo Credit: Rachel Kara
On 25 October, she'll open Mimosa Moon to the public for the first time, a single day called Garden Swoon, limited to twelve guests, running from 11am to sunset. It's a day of floristry with trade florist Josephine Kelly and her mother Jan, horticulture with Super Bloom author Jac Semmler, rewilding conversations with conservation scientist Erfan (on loan from National Geographic, mid-documentary about Protesters Falls), and the official opening of Megan's new on-farm screening room, because, as she says, why watch Netflix when you can watch FlowerFlix. It's the first of what she hopes will become a series, with future Opens planned in Paris and, eventually, further afield.
A full-circle kind of person
Perhaps that is why Megan’s story feels so familiar to us at Le Sac. Between Sahra’s life on the farm, Trisha’s garden travels and Megan’s world at Mimosa Moon, there is a shared understanding that a life can be deeply rooted and still wonderfully far-reaching.
Cattle and creativity. Gardens and travel. Work and home.
There is room for all of it.
Photo Credit: Rachel Kara
Follow Megan and The School for more from Mimosa Moon and her travels, including her 2027 trips.
And if you’d like to see the farm for yourself, Garden Swoon is on 25 October, from 11am until sunset, with just twelve places available.
