Balinese-style Tropical Garden

It has struck me recently how many creative and talented colleagues and friends I have and I wanted to showcase some of their creations and stories for you.

A search for ‘Australia’s best private tropical garden’ brings up Dennis Hundscheidt’s beautiful Balinese-style tropical garden in Brisbane – somewhere I am very keen to visit just as soon as COVID19 permits. I travelled with Dennis to Nepal and Bhutan last year and discovered that his passion and talent was rather more than just an interest in gardening and had taken him to create a stunning paradise. In Dennis’ words he is “living the dream”.

Dennis started off with a basic quarter acre suburban property which he stripped of its original pine trees and grass and brought in lots of good soil. He then brought in over a hundred different species of palms, a lot of which came from earlier collection trips into the jungles of Indonesia and Malaysia (he is a landscaper by trade). Once the canopy was established, he introduced shade-loving foliage plants to create a rainforest jungle garden. Then a swimming pool was added which of course led to further landscaping.

Ten years later Dennis bought the property next door and extended the garden to include a series of bush houses for his extensive plant collection. Then he went on to purchase a third property that was over the back fence. He demolished the bush houses and combined the two adjoining backyards into one large vacant block on which to paint his canvas, a total area of about 1000sqm.

He brought in “650 cubic meters of garden soil to create different levels which would give interest to the garden. A large water feature which includes a pond and a cascading waterfall were to be the focal point. A Balinese pavilion to over look the garden was the final structure to be added”. In this section he wanted to create something completely different from the original rainforest garden and indulge his passion for tropical plants (and for Bali – this is the first year in almost a decade that he hasn’t been able to visit there).

The design has a series of “Garden Rooms” each with their own water feature which, combined with screening plants along the boundaries, give the impression of the garden being much larger than it actually is. He has introduced lots of stone artifacts from his visits to Bali and even a small traditional Balinese style house (that came over in two large shipping containers) as a place to reflect and enjoy the surroundings.

Over the years, Dennis’ garden has appeared in multiple gardening magazines and was open to the public for over 25 years (it is no longer open to the public but you can still enjoy photos on Dennis’ website).  His garden has featured on many television gardening shows including Burkes Backyard, Gardening Australia and Jamie’s Durie’s Australia’s Best Backyard’s. Don Burke described the garden as the ‘Best Tropical Garden in Australia’ while Jamie Durie said on his show, Australia’s Best Backyards, that he thought it was one of the best tropical gardens in the world. Dennis spends his time now doing Tropical Garden Consultations that take him all around Australia and overseas.