Intersected by a shaded drive lined by maples and agapanthus, is a historical Stirling garden that represents new beginnings.
Since the 1930s it’s passed through the hands of five gardening families, including Alice Howard, a granddaughter of Sir John Downer, former Premier of South Australia.
Today it’s owned by Lindy and Richard Gill.
But their path to the property was one marked with loss and grief.
Before moving to the Adelaide Hills, the couple lived at Green Patch Homestead – a heritage-listed Georgian house near Port Lincoln on the Eyre Peninsula.
When Lindy and Richard came across Hilltop at Stirling, they finally felt that they had found what they had been looking for.
“We tragically lost everything in the Black Tuesday bushfires,” Lindy says.
“… Our neighbour was shifting his stock and he saw a fireball just come over the hill and land in the V of our roof.
“… When Richard got out there he said he heard the grand piano crash into the cellar, he heard crystal chandeliers crash.”
By the time the bushfire – the worst in South Australia since Ash Wednesday – was extinguished, it had destroyed more than 90 homes and claimed the lives of nine people.
Lindy grappled with the guilt of losing the historic homestead under her custodianship and the devastation of her losses.
But even then, she had a seed of hope.
“We went out that night and I looked at the garden that was just decimated … and I thought ‘what you had there last week, you created that from scratch,” she recalls.
“And I did think, ‘you did it once, you can do it again’.”
Over the following years Lindy began to rebuild her life, aided by medical intervention, group counselling sessions, the support of family and friends and the therapy of documenting her story.
And during that process, she began to look for a new place to call home.
“I was still grieving for the old house … but I knew I had to move on so I made the list and I started looking for properties for about three years,” she says.
She was still running a busy business at Port Lincoln, but Lindy had her heart set on the Adelaide Hills, inspired by the English gardens she had visited with her parents as a child and with Richard as an adult.
When she and Richard came across Hilltop at Stirling, they finally felt that they had found what they had been looking for.
“I didn’t know if we could be happy here, even though there was already a lovely garden, I was grieving for the old property and it was very hard,” she says.
“So we just went with it, with lots of enthusiasm and we arrived with two pieces of furniture, no experience of Hills gardening and this fortnightly commute between Port Lincoln and Adelaide.”
Over the following years Lindy and Richard built on the work of their predecessors, and created a space that has become their joy, wrapped around a Dutch Colonial house and a picturesque garden room.
Lindy describes the garden as “perfectly imperfect”.
She loves rambling softness, contrasting with formality – which are evident in the gently curving paths and shady groves that lead to open lawns and courtyards surrounded by topiary.
A result of her painstaking planning and attention to detail, “secret” views are revealed at every turn – an urn perfectly aligned in the distance between two trees or a statue revealed through a window in the foliage.
“I look at the garden and ask ‘what do you want to be?’,” she says.
“I really try to use what’s there and work around it.”
The garden consists of a number of spaces, including a topiary terrace and sunken lawn surrounded by a woodland, a number of parks shaded by decades-old trees, a pond brimming with water lilies; and a fern garden shaded by a copse of birch trees.
Lindy’s aim was not to formalise these ‘garden rooms’, but to gently link the spaces with soft lines and subtle connections.
Today it is a living portrait of the happiness that has grown out of her loss.
We wouldn’t want to live anywhere else and we don’t want to move – ever.
“We look back now and say that fire was the best thing that happened to us,” Lindy says.
“Because I pushed the boundaries to make us get over it and we’ve got a life that is perfect for us.
“We both love living up here.
“We wouldn’t want to live anywhere else and we don’t want to move – ever.”
Hilltop will open to the public over the Mother’s Day weekend, May 9 and 10, as part of Open Gardens SA’s autumn season, offering a Devonshire tea, an art exhibition, a charity auction and raffle. The proceeds will go to breast cancer research.“In the last year we had some breast cancer in the family and I thought we can share the garden and really try hard to raise a bit more money for a really good cause,” Lindy says.
“I want families and mothers and daughters and sisters to just have a special time.”
