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
OVERVIEW
Budget: $10m (AUD)
The Australian Garden is Australia’s newest public botanic garden and is located 30km south of Melbourne at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne. Stage 1 is the first of the two stages to fulfill the ambitions of the original masterplan vision. It is a garden that displays Australian flora in creative, interactive and educative ways.
Botanic gardens in Australia have traditionally been modeled on European precedents or more recently attempted to recreate the seductive qualities of the Australian landscape. The Australian Garden by contrast 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 these 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 Australians’ reverence and sense of awe for the natural landscape, and their innate impulse to change it, to make it into a humanly contrived form, beautiful yet their own work.
The western side of the Australian Garden takes its cues from the natural world, where free flowing forms, rich sensory experiences and an immersion into the Australian landscape predominate. The eastern side of the garden reflects more cultural influences with highly designed exhibition gardens (by various landscape architects) providing visitors with multiple stories and experiences.
The centerpiece of the Australian Garden is the Sand Garden. This dominant feature, viewed upon arrival to the gardens, represents the dry red centre of the Australian continent and forms a bold picture of open red sands and patterned low clipped vegetation. The garden conveys the spaciousness and the rhythmic patterns of arid inland Australian landscapes, in a bold and painterly manner. Visitors are invited to view but not enter this elusive landscape, creating a sense of mystery, distance and grandeur.
Water is the mediating element between the two influences, drawing visitors into the garden and culminating in the dramatic Rockpool Waterway. This is composed of richly patterned water course juxtaposed against a dramatic steel escarpment by artist Greg Clark. At its source the water emerges from a ‘spring’ to begin its journey over a sequence of articulated paving stones and cascading over a series of falls. The amount of water released in the waterway changes over time, imbuing the characteristics of an Australian waterway and its unpredictable mannerisms, gently flowing down the water course and sliding against and under the escarpment. Visitors are engaged in an intimate and ever changing experiential journey of familiarity and grandeur.
The visitor experience is carefully choreographed to provide rich and diverse experiences, to reinforce a sense of engagement with the Australian landscape, from the bold to the intimate. Integrated artworks from renowned artists, Greg Clark and Mark Stoner and the built forms from Architects’ Kerstin Thompson and Greg Burgess compliment the landscape setting and provide visitors with both arresting and convenient facilities.
Following the success of this project Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Paul Thompson have been invited by the client, Royal Botanic Gardens, to complete the garden design ambition and extend the garden to contain further landscape experiences, major research and interpretive features.
Environmental responsibility and sustainability.
The design is considered to be at the forefront of emerging environmental and social concerns regarding biodiversity, low water dependent horticulture, and sustainable material choices. In addition the garden design has its primary aim to challenge and excite visitors in to the powerful design potential of our underutilized native flora.
The development site is located within one of the last remaining vestiges of remnant coastal vegetation close to Melbourne.
The project site is located in a former sand mine that was left as an area of mixed soils, bereft of nutrient and making it difficult even for local species to recolonise.
The garden design promotes biodiversity, utilizing 100,000 species of Australian flora many of which have not been used before in cultivation. Protection of existing biodiversity was a primary objective with the development of the garden where weed modelling was used to establish the parameters for identifying plant species that would be likely not to invade and/or colonize adjacent remnant vegetation. Conservation and exclusion zones were protected to encourage and maintain the habitats for existing and protected wildlife.
The Garden illustrates the breadth of native flora that is tolerant of low water requirements and low nutrient soils. The result of simple amelioration using brown coal to bolster the nutrient value of the existing soils is demonstrated by the verdant growth of new plantings.
The completed design illustrates the potential of simple, cost effective materials to achieve the remarkable. Local sand, stone and granitic gravel is utilized throughout the project to embed the more complex landscape components, without compromising the high quality of the built outcome.
The garden demonstrates that high ecological and environmental performances can be embedded into a design process that reinforces a high quality visitor experiences. This is best demonstrated by the techniques and mechanisms adopted for water harvesting and groundwater recharge. Examples include the harvesting of the Visitor Centre Stormwater runoff and its direction to the Rockpool Waterway, using open swales for groundwater recharge throughout the site including the carpark and directing all subsurface drainage to the Rockpool Waterway.
This approach tackles water scarcity, biodiversity, low embodied energy materials and long life expectancies in a creative and immersive way, demonstrating that design is more than the sum of its parts but a totally holistic creative outcome.
The Garden has its principal aim to invoke delight in the beauty of the Australian landscape and prompt an awareness of its beauty, preciousness and majesty. Via a rigorous design approach the Garden celebrates the beauty of the often previously unloved, utilizing landscape themes of aridity, scarcity of water, and distinctly Australian patterns of the arid landscape to compose a unique visitor experience.
The Garden expresses a new direction in the design of Botanic Gardens particularly utilizing Australian plants based on creative landscape experiences rather than bio-region or taxonomy. The project aims to offer an insight into the greater potential of using Australian flora in interesting, provocative and delightful ways in a more experiential and interpretive setting.
The design has a conceptual rigour that may influence future landscape architects seeking to creatively respond to the beauty, diversity, tenacity of the Australian flora and landscape.
The design process explores how sculptural and artistic processes can inform landscape design. In particular, how may a process of abstraction and distillation of landscape experiences, inform a design outcome. This is then overlaid with multiple cultural overlays to create a space imbued with meaning.
Reference:
The Australian Garden: Selecting plants for a Botanic Garden
Paul Thompson AILA 2008
intro / overview / images / location / detail location /Projects
2008
