Location: Haberfield
Photographs: Robert Champion
Landscape Installation: Rhystyled Gardens
Gardening: Client + TARN
This turtle that my son and I poured is a critical part of the project, as the design tries to subtly celebrate the ‘vernacular’ gardens of the suburb.
Haberfield is a magnificent combination of Federation heritage and a later overlay of Italian home gardening, which has resulted in many fabulous idiosyncrasies and juxtapositions.
We strongly believe that vernacular (i.e. non-designed, home-made) gardens ought to be celebrated, and treated with the respect they deserve. Not in an ironic, condescending way, but with genuine reverence for the qualities they possess that many designed gardens do not: frugality, playfulness, pragmatism, absurdity, humour, non-transactional care, and (often) much lower environmental impact.
These qualities can be incorporated in a designed garden in a way that still feels elegant, beautiful and tasteful.
