Inside Honey’s Hardy Garden & Border Combinations - Part One
Photographer + Videographer Honey Atkinson has always had an eye for the natural world. She first picked up a camera at 15 and has spent more than 20 years working as a photographer, alongside a life filled with growing food, beekeeping, fermenting, sourdough and foraging. Since 2020, Honey and her family have been creating a home and garden on 10 acres on Djiringanj Country, near Bermagui on the NSW South Coast.
With productive fruit and vegetable beds already requiring plenty of attention, Honey has taken a practical approach to the ornamental garden. Her planting combinations centre around drought-tolerant, relatively low-maintenance plants, repeated throughout the property to create continuity without adding another demanding job to the list.
Here are six plant pairings from Honey’s garden worth taking a closer look at.
Fountain grass + butterfly bush
Soft fountain grass sits against the height and purple flowers of butterfly bush. The contrast in form is what makes this pairing particularly pleasing, loose grasses below, taller flowering growth behind. Butterfly bush is a newer addition to Honey’s garden and has been planted in generous swathes.
Fountain grass + lavender + blue fescue grass + Queensland bottle tree
Here, foliage and form do most of the talking. Fountain grass and blue fescue create movement lower in the bed, with lavender bringing purple into the mix and the Queensland bottle tree giving the planting height and presence.
Ornamental grapevine + grasses + potted lemon + alyssum
One of the fuller combinations in Honey’s garden centres around a timber trellis covered in ornamental grapevine. In summer, the vine creates a leafy green frame, underplanted with fountain grass. A lemon tree in a pot and fragrant flowering alyssum at its base bring an edible element into the ornamental planting.
Lavender + lavender
Sometimes the most effective plant pairing is simply more of a plant you already love. Two different lavenders grow side by side here, allowing their slightly different foliage and flowers to mingle naturally. The exact varieties are still to be identified, but may be Spanish or Riverina Thomas Lavender.
Lavender + pig’s ear
A closer combination pairs lavender with pig’s ear succulent. The pig’s ear develops pink flowers in full sun, picking up another colour within Honey’s predominantly purple and green palette while its fleshy leaves contrast with the finer lavender foliage.
Meyer lemon + alyssum
A Meyer lemon growing in a pot is softened at its base by fragrant flowering alyssum. It’s a simple idea worth borrowing for pots elsewhere in the garden: rather than leaving the soil beneath a larger potted plant bare, use a smaller flowering plant to fill the space.
Across Honey’s drought-tolerant garden, there is a lovely practicality to the way plants are used. Many have been propagated from cuttings or seed, making repetition more affordable across a large property.
Rather than continually adding something new, Honey repeats what already grows well, a little more lavender here, grasses there, purple appearing again further along. It’s a low-maintenance garden shaped as much by observation as design, and a useful reminder that some of the most convincing combinations begin with simply noticing what thrives together.
Want to see more from Honey’s garden? Follow Honey for more of her rural life, garden, and the things she grows and makes along the way. And if Kikuyu is something you’re battling in your own patch, don’t miss our free resource, Gardening with Kikuyu Grass: Lessons and Tips, where Honey and her mother, Leonie, share what they learnt from living and gardening with it.
