The cane furniture will really look nice in your verandah. As for plants, jump online and browse for some hardy plants on the Aussie websites. They are a wealth of information and if you do have a large planter box or pot make sure you put it on wheels. That way you can take your plants in and out of the house. Also put a base under the pot/planter so it catches the water and does not ruin your nice floor. You can pick these from a garden store in your area. Good luck! :) btw hope you don't mind me your spelling error "taught" should be "taut", I really hope folks correct my spelling too! cheers.

there is a gentleman designing a totally off grid home. craigmerrow is the user name, maybe try him? Keep us updated, would love to know more.

I say go for it as your door is the window to your home. My advice would be to consider the colour of the flecks in your brick to make sure your chosen colour works with it and not to forget about the colour of your roof and window frames. For example I would have loved a red door but it would have looked ghastly with the green roof on my 25 year-old house. Instead I did black with dark grey window frames (which truly just look black) which works to pick up the black in the brick. I added my big pot plants with green foliage and still got a touch of red in the form of an old chair I picked up from an op shop years ago. The entrance is welcoming, attractive and reflects what is waiting inside. Have fun and if your chosen colour isn't quite right do what I did and find a way of incorporating it into the scheme somehow.

It always makes my heart sink when a client asks for a "no-maintenance" garden. It tells me they really don't care. In truth, any planting needs a certain amount of care. Plants, like animals, need care. It's true that they're slower than animals to respond to deprivation, but respond they do. And it's not a good look. You might not have a lot of time, or you may not be physically up to a lot of gardening. That's fine - you can choose plants that require a minimum of care and grooming, and if need be hire somebody to do that minimum. But it does require planning. A gardener actively engaged with their garden can (and will!) experiment, try new things, move plants around, notice when things are going right and wrong, and for them a garden is never finished. Contrast that with somebody who wants a garden they don't want to work in or at. They want a garden that is more or less "finished" the day it is installed, rolled out like a stretch of lawn and meant to "behave", to stay static. I can't do a garden like that! Plants grow! They change, the environment around them can change, and what might have succeeded one year is not going to do it the next. It is entirely usual for a planting that just nicely fits a situation to need complete re-planting a few years on because the individual plants have outgrown the site. That's work! It is entirely usual for plants to flower, and for those flowers to set seed and die off. It is entirely usual for some plants to shed leaves as part of their yearly cycle. This "mess" is treated by non-gardeners as a crisis, as a nasty surprise, as something the plants "shouldn't" do. Because it makes work. Well, sorry, but no garden consultant can change the laws of nature. If you want a garden, you've bought work, and if you don't want to do it, you're going to need to pay somebody else. That's fine. Just don't ask for what you can't have.