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Rather than framing ocean
views, the design directs
attention inwards, highlighting
the clifftop’s unique geology
and form through exposed
rock faces.uninspiring and thirsty lawn, clumps of fragrant herbs and
edible groundcovers – oregano and thyme matted with native
violet and kidney weed – create a soft, wild carpet underfoot.
Here, the processes of succession have been invited in to
transform a spatial typology often expected to provide a
static frame to the street.
JILA has designed both front and rear spaces to perform – to
provide. The house’s owner mentions that neighbours and
walkers en route to the area’s nearby clifftop parklands often
slow to admire the garden, commenting on its abundant
planting. This is hardly surprising. In contrast to the gardens
of neighbouring houses, (which are often bare and denuded
for fear of obscuring precious views), this landscape is full,
generous and alive. Facing the street, small trees work both
as screens and producers, with guava and citrus trees
nudging the edges of the space and local native species
jumping the boundary. Banksias supply nectar and shelter
for local wildlife and a coastal tea tree offers dappled shade
and the promise of a future gnarled and greyed trunk. I ask
Irwin a dull question about maintenance, and the question
is reshaped in her answer, becoming an anecdote about how
the garden teaches, with decisions about pruning, removal
and maintenance weighed against the course the garden itself
wants to take – a process of watching and learning.As the three of us – writer, owner and designer – sit in the
house’s rear space, partially blinded by the morning light
blinking off the Tasman Sea, the owner claims the garden
is, despite appearances, “not about the view.” This is at least
partially true. Despite its ocean outlook, the design of the
house’s rear landscape shuns the usual strategies of view-
framing, tumbling downward from a square of lawn toward
exposed rock faces that reference and reinforce – through
form and materiality – the site’s clifftop location. The garden’s
current form reflects a “starting point” planting plan (from
which planting has continued to change and evolve), with
individual specimens selected and positioned according to the
fall of the site. Space has been defined by an artful placing of
stone. Rock orchids sprout adjacent to a stair at the end of the
house’s natural pool, while common tussock-grass captures
the morning light, bending romantically in the wind.^05
A moving garden: from
the designer’s initial plan,
planting has been encouraged
to adapt and evolve in
response to the site’s dynamic
conditions.04 05LANDSCAPE ISSUE 163 044 —P R O J E C T
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