I live at the Neika garden with my husband Andrew and our two border collies, Pearl and Peggotty.

We feel very lucky to live here, close to Hobart but so close to bushwalking tracks and the Southern Forests. I spend almost every day outside, gardening or walking, and I am endlessly fascinated by plants - I can't help but want to propagate them - so I always seem to have a few seeds to sow after a walk. I love the bush around us and I am keen to blur the boundary between the endemic plants and the non-native.

I have always loved the outdoors, I spent a lot of my childhood on the riverbank arranging driftwood and rocks. My interest in flowers led me to study floristry at the Constance Spry Flower School in London where I was introduced to all sorts of fascinating plants. I worked for some time as a Florist in London and back in Tasmania where I started the Flower Barrows and Bloomsbury, a flower shop in Hobart.

When we moved to Neika, I started growing plants that were hard to find from seed from all over the world - all the plants we saw in overseas magazines but not available here. I travelled to see plants growing in their natural habitats, like Iran, the Canary Islands and Kyrgyzstan. It was fascinating to see the plant communities and how complex they are….no mulching or extra water once the snow melts.

Eventually, I had my own quarantine house and I was able to import some fascinating plants from different parts of the World. I ran Plant Hunters, a small mail-order nursery, and I also had garden fairs here with other specialised nurseries.

I am now trying to reduce the size of the garden to make it more manageable and where once I wouldn't have opened the garden until it was ‘finished’ I think it’s good to show you the realities of a large garden that I can still really enjoy, rather than be frustrated because I can't “do it all”.

The garden at Neika has seen quite a few substantial changes, as we altered it to fit the site rather than imposing a more rigid style. One of the first things I did was to put in a double herbaceous border, inspired by visiting English gardens. It was lovely but didn't really suit the amphitheatre shape of this property and it didn't suit my personality, which is not very orderly, so out it came to be replaced by a much more relaxed garden.

My main focus with the garden was to have places to grow every interesting thing I could get my hands on so I could propagate for my Nursery, but now that I don’t need to have every interesting new plant, I find I am concentrating on the plants that I have found to be very garden worthy. I still have many of the exquisite ephemeral plants that appear in early Spring and interesting bulbs that appear amongst the plants that have more substance. I have always been interested to know where plants come from so that I can understand the best place to grow them in a garden situation whether it is in full sun or deep shade and avoid plants that won't thrive here. I have been able to concentrate more on the design of the garden recently and I am trying to make it more mysterious and more coherent at the same time.

The garden has become a haven for wildlife - there is something for them to eat pretty much all year round, the ponds are teeming with frogs and we have wood ducks and maned geese in the wetland along with a visiting platypus. I have come to accept a much wilder garden with areas that offer seed and hiding places for little creatures. The working garden is fenced against Bennet's wallabies, pademelons and rabbits but they have free reign in 6 acres. Possums can create havoc but I have learned to accommodate them as there will never be any less.

- Sally Johannsohn