Victorian Sites
The Australian Garden - Stage One
intro / overview / images / location / detail location /Projects
Landscape Architect: Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Paul Thompson AILA
Location: Botanic Gardens at Cranbourne (30 km south of Melbourne CBD)
1000 Ballarto Road, Cranbourne
The Australian Garden is Australia’s newest Botanic Garden and is located 30km south of Melbourne at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne. It is a garden that displays Australian flora in creative, interactive and educative ways.
The Australian Garden uses the Australian landscape as its inspiration to create a sequence of powerful sculptural and artistic landscape experiences that recognize its diversity, breadth of scale and wonderful contrasts. Via creative landscape compositions, the project seeks to stimulate and educate visitors of the potential use and diversity of Australian flora.
A primary theme through the garden design is the exploration and expression of the evolving relationship between Australians and their landscape and flora. The garden expresses this tension between our reverence and awe for the natural landscape and our innate impulse to change it, to make it into a humanly contrived form, beautiful yet our own work.
The garden imaginatively responds to the brief which asked:
- Explore and illustrate the role of native flora in shaping the nature of Australia.
- Display native flora in creative ways.
- Celebrate the role of Australian plants in Australian life and culture.
Via bold immersive garden experiences, dramatic sculptural forms, subtle detailing, rich and diverse plantings, visitors are invited to take a journey into the breadth and beauty of the Australian landscape and flora. Garden experiences such as the Sand Garden, Rockpool Waterway, Arid Gardens and the Eucalypt Walk, celebrate and capture some of the quintessential qualities of this vast landscape canvas. Utilizing 100,000 species of flora, some never before seen in cultivation, the garden illustrates the enormous potential of our flora in creating distinctive, bold and memorable garden experiences.
The Garden is considered to be at the forefront of emerging environmental concerns regarding biodiversity, low water dependent horticulture, water sensitive design and sustainable material choices. These issues are integrated into the overall composition, demonstrating that design is more than the sum of its parts but instead a totally holistic and creative outcome.
The Australian Garden demonstrates how landscape architecture can lead and curate the integration of diverse teams of artists, sculptors, horticulturalists, architects, and an array of other specialist disciplines to achieve an integrated designed outcome.
Finally, the project demonstrates the potential of a successful collaborative client relationship. The guidance, expertise and creative expectations of the Royal Botanic Gardens challenged, provoked and rewarded the design team with their expert horticultural knowledge and enriched the final realization with their expert stewardship, implementation and maintenance regimes.
Project Consultant Team
Landscape Architecture and Lead Consultants:
Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Paul Thompson AILA
Architecture: Rockpool Shelter: Greg Burgess Architects
Engineering: Structural and Civil: Meinhardt
Irrigation: Irrigation Design Consultants
Water Feature: Waterforms International
Cost Planning: Donald Cant Watts Corke
Sculpture: Ephemeral Lake: Mark Stoner and Edwina Kearney
Escarpment Wall: Greg Clark
Soil Consultants: Robert van de Graaff
Lighting: Barry Webb and Associates
Architecture - Visitor Centre: Kirsten Thompson Architects
Further reference:
The Australian Garden: Selecting plants for a Botanic Garden
Paul Thompson AILA 2008
intro / overview / images / location / detail location /Projects
2008
