Victorian Projects and Sites
THE HOME GARDEN
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Landscape Architects: Coomes Consulting Group and Neil Marriott
Location: Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne
The Home Garden won the 2004 Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne (RBG) competition to design an Exhibition Garden that is an artistic expression of Australian garden landscapes and that demonstrates the connections that exist between environment and culture.
The Home Garden is highly significant to the theory and practice of landscape architecture by virtue of its acknowledged success in communicating a multi-faceted environmental and educational message to the community. The Home Garden also demonstrates the landscape architect’s role in facilitating successful collaboration between designers, scientists, building trades, educators and managers.
The Home Garden draws on the publications and broadcasts that have similarly stimulated, educated and entertained us over the last 100 or so years.
It is composed by stitching together collected ‘fragments’ which are facsimiles of parts of Australian domestic gardens of differing, well known styles and periods but planted entirely with native plants.
It references by plans of ‘heritage gardens’ of the late 19th and early 20th century, popular ‘home beautiful’ magazines of the1950’s, the wave of ‘Bush Garden’ books of the 1970’s and by contemporary coffee table journals and televised ‘make overs.’
At its simplest level The Home Garden is proof that sustainable use of native plants can suit all garden styles – at its most profound level it provides the deep intellectual and emotional stimulus to Australians that the Client, the RBG, seeks.
The Home Garden is also a place for visitors to contemplate and come to terms with their obligations to the environment, its management and sustainability.
The environmental credentials of The Home Garden are sound, resulting as it does from a far-sighted brief from the RBG whose charter requires respect for the environment through design, science, recreation and community education. The materials used include not only environmentally appropriate and low resource demanding native plants but also recycled building elements. Construction by FRH Pty Ltd was subject to the RBG Environmental Management Plan, weed and quarantine protocol and similar controls have continued during maintenance.
Coomes Consulting Group and Neil Marriott, September 2008
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