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On the way out to a garden nursery to get some native grasses and trees for our new place, we drove past our old home. It is in the country on 6Ha and for seven years was transformed from a bare paddock to a renovated (more like fully rebuilt, to be honest) 100 year old villa hidden amongst bands of native garden. Cabbage trees, grasses, beech, lemonwoods all planted and tended with care.

You can see where this is going, can't you.

The gardens have been bulldozed flat and sewn in lawn. It looks like a boring house plonked on a bit of land in the middle of a paddock. We were stunned. It is certainly easy-care but so was the old garden, as the grasses kept the weeds down nicely. At least they didn't just lay concrete, I guess.

Going to the nursery afterwards seemed a little pointless and I felt as though we were wandering aimlessly for a while. I had gone to exactly the same nursery for our old house and now all those plants were gone.

Philip, our lovely real estate agent put it very clearly: "never go back"