For the past decade, Dale Frank has been creating a massive garden on his historic property, Hambledon Hill, near Singleton.

"That was a bare paddock 10 years ago," said the artist, as his gaze wandered along alleys of colours flourishing. "I always knew I wanted to do a garden through there."

With the paddocks as his canvas, Frank has so far planted out about 10 hectares and is planning for the garden to be eventually double that in size.

"The gardens I've always liked have been on a scale," he said. "Historically, estate gardens were always large. You had landscapers come into make artificial hills, you made lakes. That's the type of heritage I wanted in this garden."

Dale Frank is tapping into that heritage and reshaping the past. A former sand quarry on the property has been transformed into a lake. And he tends to the large trees, such as Queensland kauri and hoop pines, around his two-storey Victorian-era home. Some of those trees were planted when the house was built in the 1860s.

"They always planted large, majestic trees because they had the land," he said.

But Dale Frank is also nurturing a vision for the future.

For this garden is about not just the scale but what it contains. So far, more than 5600 plants have gone into the Dale Frank Botanical Gardens. Many are dry climate plants, including agaves, bottle trees and a vast range of cacti. The garden is also signposted with palms.

Apart from the combinations of these plants forming a stunning visual statement, there is also a practical reason for a dry garden.

"Out of the 10 years I've been working in the garden, on developing this garden, it didn't rain for eight of those 10 years," Dale Frank explained. "So it was almost a natural thing."

The artist is also planting trees to provide shade and protect what grows underneath.

'With the climate warming and temperatures increasing, cactus like shade as well, so throughout the garden there are enormous trees," he said. "The cactus can live underneath, then there will be huge canopies."

In bringing life to his garden, Dale Frank is giving new life to many of the plants. A large number of the plants have been rescued from sites marked for clearing and development. Western Sydney is a particularly rich source of plants needing a new home.

"With all the development that's going on out there, there's lots of plants coming up," he said, citing as an example a cactus, estimated to be 140 years old. It was saved from a block in western Sydney.

"That would've been just bulldozed."

One of the garden's features is a circle of 19 rare Moroccan date palms, which were sourced from land about to be subdivided for housing blocks near Ipswich in Queensland.

But to Dale Frank the satisfaction lies in not just rescuing trees; he is buying time, so that his garden has already mature plants in it.

"What it means to me is that I get a 14-metre palm tree that is 110 years old, so I get to see it," he said.

"So the bones of the garden have become visible in the past 10 years, because I'm buying these mature trees. What I'm doing is developing a garden now that, if I'd planted it from normal commercial stock, nursery stock, in many cases it would be 100 years before it gets to this."

But the cost of buying mature trees, transporting them on semi-trailers from far and wide to Hambledon Hill, and hiring a crane to lift and plant them in the garden can be sizeable.

"Some trees are like a deposit on a house - okay, a cheap house," Frank said. "But other trees, a mature tree, I can't believe how inexpensive they are. And I think, 'Well, that's not even a deposit on a car!'."

The tree-laden trucks keep turning up at Hambledon Hill.

"I've had 21 semi-trailers arrive in December and January and planted 21 Moreton Bay fig trees, so they'll also make a forest in one area," he said.

Dale Frank has made a career from pushing paint around, shaping order from chaos. Now he is doing the same with plants. He is the designer of the garden.

"The garden is borrowing from what I've learnt from painting," Frank said.

"It's the same as producing a painting, because you put a mark on a canvas, for example. That gives you alternatives to what's next. And after 40 years of being an artist, you know how to work it. It's the same with a garden.

"What I normally do, when I'm extending an area, it is the large rescued trees that go in first, and then you can see what needs to go somewhere.

"The time that they mature and grow, that is also an element you've got to consider in constructing and designing a garden. You don't have to consider that with a painting.

"Where it [a tree] is placed is crucial to how it will look in 50 years, 100 years, 150 years, 200 years."

While the garden is the fruit of his vision, Dale Frank doesn't labour alone.

He has a garden manager, James Smith, who has been here since 2013, around the same time the horticultural vision began growing. A former soldier who served in Afghanistan, James Smith said this role was completely different to life in the army.

"It's allowed me to bring out a more creative side," he said.

However, working with spiky plants, he has copped plenty of wounds: "I've still got a thorn in my arm from about five months ago."

Dale Frank's studio assistant, Trevelyan Clay, also works in the garden, happily swapping art materials for plants.

"It's a lot of fun," said Mr Clay. "And you can get some fresh air after being near resins all day."

The design includes avenues of plants, with names such as Gum Alley and Top Alley, allowing the eye to wander and amble to distant features, be it a sculpture or a human-made hill.

There are also areas that look like installation art, including a spot that has an arrangement of bottle trees and barrel cacti, which has been called Bottles and Barrels.

Dale Frank said that, unlike many public gardens, the viewer or walker was not directed by the design. Rather, it presented options and the "dilemma" of alternative views or other avenues to walk.

"So it will be a garden where it will take four or five visits before you see everything," he said.

The opportunity to visit this private garden arrives on Sunday. Dale Frank Botanical Gardens will be open to the public between 10am and 2pm.

The artist has been persuaded to open the gates to his vision, after receiving many requests from people who have seen photos posted on his Instagram handle, @dalefrankbotanicalgardens. Tickets for the open day can be bought there.

A couple of previous attempts to hold an open day at the garden were scuttled by COVID restrictions.

To James Smith, the gardens will open visitors' eyes to plants rarely seen in Australia, let alone in the Hunter.

"You can't get to just any town or botanical gardens and see the kinds of plants Dale has," said James Smith.

"I'd love to know if there is any other garden of this type and size in Australia."

During its life, Hambledon Hill has notched up a number of milestones. It was home to the owner of a Melbourne Cup winner, and in the early part of the 20^th century it was a prize-winning cattle stud, run by a member of the family that founded the David Jones department store empire. Asked what he reckoned those former owners would make of the garden, Frank replied, "I think they'd like it because there are photos in the museum ... of them here ... and in the front there are three large cactus.

For Dale Frank, as his garden grows, so do his hopes and aims.

"I am getting more and more - not obsessed," he said, before thinking for a moment. "Yes, almost obsessed."

"I want it to be one of the greatest gardens in Australia, or however you want to broaden it, both in rarity and the aspect where the design is unexpected."

As to whether his botanical gardens were Dale Frank's greatest creation, the artist said, "I can't tell. Time will tell. Others will tell."

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