Location: Alexandria, Sydney
Built: 2021/2022
Photographs: Robert Champion
Landscape Installation: Rhystyled Gardens
Gardening: Clients + TARN
The brief for this garden was primarily to make something special for the client’s 3-year-old child. We took this brief extremely seriously. Research involved reading Dr Seuss, Hairy Maclary and more. We re-aquanted ourselves with the joyful naivety of Winnie the Pooh, and the ghastliness of Lion King’s ‘elephants graveyard’ and May Gibbs’ ‘Big Bad Banksia Men’.
We also consulted our own nostalgic memories of gardens as a child, and considered how each of the five senses had made imprints on this period of life. The smell of sweet alyssum and heliotrope in a grandparents garden. The sound of rustling grass and you push through it, under it. Leaves that looked like tongues, kidneys, hands or other body parts. The fluffy texture of lambs ears. The taste of fresh herbs. Freesias.
We looked at the three tight spaces that are adjacent to this terrace house and conceived very different characters for each, almost entirely unrelated. Each is divided by a tumbling curtain of the native climber Clematis glycinoides, or ‘headache vine’, which flowers profusely each spring.
A timber boardwalk gives the middle zone an unusual elevated experience above the planting, allowing for more generous garden beds and resolving an otherwise awkward level change. The concrete slab of the side passage was lifted and fragments turn upside down and used as stepping stones.
This garden may only survive a few more years until the clients renovate. Much of the hard materials have been designed to be easily dismantlable and re-usable, from the recycled paving laid on sand to the timber boardwalk. As for the plants, the clients already have plans to pot up as much as possible and hold it in their parents garden for use in the new garden spaces. We are deeply interested in the idea of generating a reconstituted garden, as second life of something that had already been so loved and inhabited.
