Leura Gardens Festival, Blue Mountains Spring Gardens

"Dead End House". The planting of this magnificent garden was begun by the Cox family in the 1950's, but the design today is largely attributable to the current owners, Robert Brain and Neal Blewett. Their contribution includes the beautiful ironstone walls and drum pillars,  terraces,  ponds and colourful mosaics. This is a natural garden, shaded by mature trees, with rooms and corners and few, if any, traditional beds. Instead shrubs and trees find their own space and the garden is full of movement and surprise.

You enter by a gravel drive between a towering deodar and a majestic copper beech, and proceed ahead between a spectacular flowering crab apple and espaliered camellias against the walls of the house.  The drive opens onto a park like terrace with maples, a pistachio, and two huge American cottonwoods, dominating the skyline.

From this point you are invited to explore the garden in any direction you wish, noting that there are numerous places to relax and contemplate the garden.  The gravel drive itself opens ont the mosaic pergola and the vegetable garden; a slate path to the left of the lawn leads to a path alongside a stone wall which takes you above a native garden, through which you descend to the pond in the lower garden; the same pond can also be reached by wooden, paved or wood chipped paths of varying steepness, all originating from the lawn terrace, and passing through a cottage style garden.

To leave Dead End house, you return to the terrace, cross to the lawn to the left of the house(by the water tanks) and make your way through a glade, bordered by camellias, pieris and rhodendrons, and dotted with weeping maples beneath an acient silver birch.  Exit by the gravel drive through you entered.