Pacific Palms is one of those pockets of the Mid North Coast where every block has its own little personality. Steep coastal blocks dropping toward the lake, native bushland edges, that magic light through the gum trees, and the strong scent of saltwater carrying up from Boomerang Beach. It’s also a holiday-home heavy area — plenty of properties spend nine months a year empty and three months at full capacity over school holidays. We finished a job there last month for owners who fall into exactly that pattern: they live in Sydney, come up six or seven weekends a year, and spend a few solid weeks on the block over Christmas. The brief was unusual but increasingly common: design a garden that survives long stretches of nobody being there.
The Pacific Palms brief
The clients had bought their Pacific Palms property about four years ago — a tidy 1990s timber-clad coastal home perched on a sloped block with views through the trees toward Wallis Lake. The previous owners had clearly loved gardening, but had also been retired and on site full-time. Once the new owners took over, the garden quietly fell apart. By the time they called us, the front yard was a mix of overgrown agapanthus, weed-choked gravel, three large gardenias that had died, and a hose-fed irrigation system that hadn’t been turned on in two years. They told me they didn’t want anything fancy. They wanted a garden that looked good when they pulled into the driveway after the four-hour drive from Sydney, and didn’t punish them for the months they weren’t there.
The site walk and the design philosophy
I always start with a long walk around the block, looking at sun angles, drainage paths, the existing native bush at the boundaries, and what the views actually want framed. Pacific Palms blocks like this one don’t need a heavy formal garden — they want planting that disappears into the surrounding landscape and lets the views and the coastal light do the talking. We agreed on a design philosophy early: keep almost no lawn, plant generously with hardy natives that suit Mid North Coast conditions, mulch heavily everywhere to suppress weeds, install a smart drip irrigation system the clients could monitor from Sydney, and define the entry and front path with strong simple geometry so the place reads as cared-for the moment you arrive.
Removing what didn’t belong
Day one was the demo crew. Out came the agapanthus (a thirsty, weedy choice on a coastal block), the dead gardenias, an old timber retaining sleeper that had rotted at the base, and about three cubic metres of weed-choked gravel that was growing more weed than it was suppressing. We carefully kept three established Spotted Gums at the back of the block — they were the strongest existing feature on site, and any landscape design that ignored them would have been working against the place rather than with it. We also carefully kept a healthy clump of grass trees on the eastern boundary, because mature grass trees are practically irreplaceable.
The retaining and path work
The block dropped about 800mm from the front kerb to the front of the house. Rather than fight that with a cut-and-fill exercise, we worked with the slope — a low sandstone retaining wall about a third of the way down the front yard, terracing the space into two planted zones, and a curving path of large bluestone steppers cutting through the lower zone to the front door. The retaining wall sits about 500mm high and uses irregular dressed sandstone blocks that match the colour of the local geology. We backfilled the wall with free-draining gravel and an ag drain — the same approach we’d take on any coastal slope. For more on this kind of work, our piece on retaining walls for sloped coastal blocks goes into the engineering detail.
Plant selection: the holiday-home test
Every plant in this garden had to pass what I call the holiday-home test: would it survive three months of nobody touching it, in any season? Out went anything that demanded regular feeding or pruning. In went a layered native palette: Coastal Banksia and Spotted Gum (existing) at the back, Westringia ‘Grey Box’ as a structural mid-layer, Coastal Rosemary along the lower retaining wall, Lomandra ‘Tanika’ in drifts through the front beds for movement, three feature Grass Trees relocated to high-impact positions, and a generous understorey of Dichondra and Native Violet as living mulch. Closer to the front door, we used a smaller-scale palette of dwarf Lilly Pilly and clumping Liriope to give a slightly tidier feel right where the eye lingers. For more on what we plant in this region, see our piece on hardy native plants for Forster gardens.
The smart irrigation system
The single biggest investment in this garden, after the planting, was the smart drip irrigation system. We ran inline drip line through every garden bed (no sprinklers anywhere — they waste water on a coastal block and they’re useless in the wind), zoned into four areas based on water needs, and tied the whole thing to a Hunter Hydrawise smart controller mounted in the garage. The controller is connected to the home Wi-Fi and the clients can check, adjust, or override it from their phone in Sydney. If a Pacific Palms storm dumps 50mm overnight, the controller skips the morning cycle automatically. If the clients want to do a deep manual water before driving up for a long weekend, they tap a button at home. Our piece on irrigation systems for Forster gardens goes deeper into how we approach this.
Mulch, mulch, mulch
One of the most boring but most important steps in any holiday-home garden is the mulching. We laid a 75mm depth of premium hardwood mulch across every garden bed, with the depth slightly heavier (100mm) on the western edge that catches the most afternoon sun. Mulch suppresses weeds, retains soil moisture, regulates root-zone temperature, and slowly breaks down to feed the plants. On a property where nobody’s pulling weeds for three months at a stretch, mulch is the single biggest determinant of whether the garden looks neglected or just settled when the owners pull back into the driveway.
The hardscape touches
We finished the front entry with a small bluestone-paved landing at the front door, two cylindrical pots planted with Grass Trees flanking the path, and a single matte-black powder-coated up-light at the base of the retaining wall to throw a wash of light up the wall after dark. Hardscape that’s well-considered does most of the heavy lifting in a holiday-home garden — plants soften the lines but the bones of the place are the paths, walls and edges. Where outdoor living is part of the brief (and it nearly always is on the coast), we’ve covered the broader picture in our piece on outdoor entertaining areas.
The handover and the test drive home
The clients flew up from Sydney for the handover and we spent an hour walking them through the irrigation app, the watering schedule, the mulch top-up they’d want to do once a year, and the simple seasonal jobs (light prune of the Westringia in late winter, deadhead the grass trees if they want a tidier look). Then they drove away. Six weeks later, after a stretch of weather that included a heatwave and two solid storms, I stopped by during another Pacific Palms job and the garden was looking exactly as designed — established, settled, no weeds, no stress. That’s the result every holiday-home brief is aiming for.
If you’ve got a Pacific Palms, Smiths Lake or Forster Keys property like this
The patterns we see across Pacific Palms, Smiths Lake, Boomerang and the Forster Keys are remarkably similar — coastal blocks, holiday-home or part-time-residence usage, owners who want a beautiful place to arrive at without the maintenance of a full-time gardener. The right design plus the right plant palette plus a smart irrigation system makes this completely achievable. For homeowners thinking about the broader low-maintenance picture, our low-maintenance Forster garden guide is a good starting point.