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The design of fashion doyenne Perri
Cutten’s coastal garden extends the
belief behind her label that real style
rides out all trend and remains “true
to self”. Central to the garden’s scheme
is a 100-metre-long dry-wall structure,
within which nine open ‘rooms’ each
feature plantings particular to a person
and place in Cutten’s life.
The Constant
Gardener
Fashion designer Perri Cutten’s sense of style and beauty is reflected in her
classically proportioned Mornington Peninsula garden, a true labour of love.
photographer: marcel aucar writer: annemarie kiely
Vogue LiVing noV/Dec 11 193

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The property’s hothouse, constructed with
salvaged timbers, doubles as an outdoor
living room. It is fitted with a fireplace,
soft furnishings and plenty of potting
benches where Perri Cutten and her
partner, photographer Jo Daniell,
pot hyacinths for family and friends.
Vogue LiVing noV/Dec 11 195

196 Vogue LiVing noV/Dec 11
“I don’t care what
someone else thinks is
style – a garden has to
be what you love.”
Salvaged pier timbers and rusted steel girders form
a 100-metre-long pergola, bordering the sequence of
‘rooms’, around which entwine Jasminum azoricum
or azores jasmine, white wisteria, white bougainvillea,
Chinese star jasmine and Japanese ornamental grape.
The enveloping dry-stone walls were built by two
‘stonies’ who stayed with Cutten and Daniell
during the two-year course of its construction.

a quick scan of the coastal garden that gives Perri Cutten
constant joy and endless jobs shows that this doyenne of
Australian fashion is not of English writer Herbert E Bates’s
belief that gardens should be “like lovely, well-shaped girls:
all curves… seductive surprises, then still more curves”. No,
her patch of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula is more the
model type – a straight-up-and-down, open-faced, angular
beauty with a distinctly Aussie ambivalence to artifice.
That’s not to suggest that Cutten can’t do curves – she
is more adept than most at decanting the full figure into
flattering form – rather, that her style is rooted in the simple
ratios that regulate the universal perception of beauty. Some
term it classicism, others “good taste”, but Cutten just calls it
being “true to self”. “It has to be you,” she says, extending her
fashion mantra into garden design. “I don’t care what someone
else thinks is style – a garden has to be what you love.”
Without oversimplifying her success into the cliché of
personal likes – she and business partner Michael Gannon
have grown the Perri Cutten label into 32 shops and
department store concessions by giving professional women
the classic chic-with-a-tweak that they want – Cutten knows
that seeding exoticism in an inhospitable environment
simply spells extinction. It’s a lesson learned early from her
“plants man” father who aided in the creation of the
spectacular National Rhododendron Gardens in Victoria’s
cold-climate Dandenong Ranges.
“I get nervous when I see too much hedging and clipping,”
she says, bristling at the propensity in these coastal parts to
try to tame the windswept landscape into static parterre.
“Controlled nature has its place, but for us, on a farm, in
a mercilessly dry Australian landscape, it seems oxymoronic.”
A timber gateway, this picture, forms
a threshold to the outdoor rooms into which
Cutten’s garden is divided. One of several inspired
by a particular person, top right, this garden
is given over to the memory of Daniell’s mother,
painter Yvonne Atkinson (aka ‘Ginger’).
It combines bush anemones with blueberry ash,
euphorbia and under-plantings of forget-me-nots
and rosemary. opposite: Peony poppies under an
old pomegranate tree under-planted with borage.
Her garden, a linear sequence of nine ‘rooms’, proportioned around the golden ratio
and each planted in memory of a special person and place, was cajoled out of a paddock
of clay over a 10-year period by both Cutten and her partner, photographer Jo Daniell.
He is the self-declared “mower, slasher, weeder, burner” who distracts from an obvious
talent to abstract the earth’s surface into art (his shots of Antarctic ice shelves are moving
meditations on white) by saying that Melbourne landscape architect Garth Paterson was
integral to the establishment of the garden and Julian Ronchi, of Julian Ronchi Garden
Design & Nursery, crucial to its evolution. “This is my room,” Daniell says of one
idiosyncratic space in the 100-metre stretch of dry-walled rooms planned by architect
friend Allan Powell. “There are hellebores – beautiful white, perfumed flowers that were
my mother’s favourites – pomegranates and plenty of philadelphus because I have spent
a lot of time in the deserts of Africa and the Middle East.”
Cutten continues leading along a room-connecting corridor – surfaced with the
crushed remnants of the enveloping dry-stone structure – and explains that the two
‘stonies’ who interlocked all the local Dromana rock into what looks like an antipodean
ruin (“not a hint of mortar”) lived in Cutten and Daniell’s garage for the two-year
duration of the build. “They were true artists – they did it all by eye,” she says of their
knuckle-skinning craft. “They claimed that the rocks told them where they wanted to go.”
Bordered by a 100-metre length of weather-purged pergola – sentry lines of old pier
posts supporting rusted steel girder – and mediated by an elegant strip of irrigation
channel, the rooms prompt the question of whose portrait each set of plantings represents.
“Well, this belongs to Maggie Tabberer,” Cutten says of a space drenched in the heady
scent of rose. “She once stayed and gave us the flower that had been named in her honour.
It is fabulous, white, and never stops giving – just like her.”
The neighbouring room, a reminder of Cutten’s mother, is a swaying sea of sword-like
foliage – Dierama pulcherrimum or angels’ fishing rods – from which white bells pop in the
third week of November, the occasion of her mother’s birthday. More vertically expressive
is the cypress-guarded patch for Daniell’s mother, painter Yvonne Atkinson, aka ‘Ginger’
– a soft, soulful spread of white Carpentaria californica (bush anemones), Elaeocarpus reticulatus
(blueberry ash) and euphorbia, under-planted with forget-me-nots and rosemary.
“It’s a cliché, but when you make a garden you are never really making it for yourself,”
says Daniell, stepping up beyond this architectural order into a secret garden of she-oaks
laden with dewdrops that turn to diamonds in the early morning sun. “It’s also about
sharing.” And they do, sending friends and family home with hyacinths potted in the
hothouse and exotic fruit and country vegetables harvested from the wider gardens.
“It’s a lot of work, but that’s what we like to do,” says Cutten, qualifying that beauty, in
a garment or a garden, is a by-product of the real business of planning, designing, costing,
exercising vision and then just digging deep. “Gardens put you back in sync with the
seasons.” After decades of pre-empting their turn, Cutten is now happy to slide, but not
slow, into semi-retirement – after walking the Tarn River in France’s Languedoc region,
she’s soon to explore her own country’s heart. “It’s time to stop and smell the roses.” vl
Vogue LiVing noV/Dec 11 199