Mayfield Garden creator & entrepreneur Garrick Hawkins on how boyhood farm holidays ignited his passion for the land & his vision to build a country garden, that’s transformed over decades into 1 of Southern Hemisphere’s largest privately-owned gardens

While business entrepreneur Garrick Hawkins made his fortune as a young man in the more traditional fields of stockbroking, finance & investment banking, over the past 3-decades he’s been quietly creating & building his legacy in the less trodden field (pun intended) of horticulture. As a schoolboy Garrick Hawkins’ dream of one day owning a farm, & building his family a country house and garden on it, became a larger vision which has been slowly, tenaciously, beautifully realised in Oberon NSW, west of the Blue Mtns.

Starting with 1 working sheep farm in 1984, Garrick Hawkins was inspired by the grand European gardens, as he set out to create and build – with the partnership & help of talented local trades and craftspeople -- a vast cool-climate garden but with a unique Australian country flavour, that now spreads across an entire valley, and is one of the largest privately- owned, cool-climate gardens in the world. How one man’s folly became a garden for all Australians to enjoy, and how that finance guy learned to slow down and enjoy watching his legacy blossom and flourish.

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