AGENDA
- The green roof of the Prince
Alfred Park Pool, by Neeson Murcutt
Architects and Sue Barnsley Design,
introduced an endemic planting
scheme to this Victorian-period park,
prompting some confusion and a
number of complaints from ratepayers.
Photo: Brett Boardman
P
rince Alfred Park, a 7.5-hectare park in
inner Sydney, needs little introduction.
Reinvigorated in 2013 by Sue Barnsley
Design and Neeson Murcutt Architects for
the City of Sydney, the multi-award-winning project
has been roundly celebrated and become a treasured
open space for the city. While the park’s innovations
and inclusions have been thoroughly discussed, its
implications, especially in regard to planting design,
have received considerably less attention.
The project began in 2006 after a period of
drought, when the park languished with stressed
mature trees and little variety in underplanting. The
figs, planted circa 1870 along Cleveland Street, strug-
gled with psyllid attacks while newer tree plantings
were damaged by insensitive maintenance.^1 The
planting scheme proposed for the park, most notably
the green roof to the rethought pool and the native
meadow bordering Cleveland Street, were attempts to
add complexity and nuance to a tired site, and to add
an ecological element to the design. In the case of the
seemingly humble native meadow, planting design
has been used to engage with an even more neglected
aspect of planting – that of culture.
The native meadow in this location can be read
as a subtle argument for the validity and place of
endemic planting within the confines of the historic,
largely Victorian-period parks of central Sydney,
particularly in its siting along a major view line into
the park. From Cleveland Street, the view to a gently
rolling traditional lawn is now framed by the some-
times brown, sometimes golden native seed heads,
adding a layer of complexity both to the park’s overall
planting and to the range of ways we view the appro-
priateness of grasslands within our parks.
Incorporating native grasses in public spaces
required a shift in attitude regarding maintenance, a
questioning of the urge to mow and trim and a recon-
sideration of the idea of grassed areas as ecologically
and temporally potent spaces, rather than static
swathes of green. Potential grassland species were
tested on site in patches, trialling issues of resiliency,
speed of growth and competition. In some cases,
unexpected plants such as Wahlenbergia stricta
(Australian bluebells) emerged, suggesting a layered
history lying dormant in the site’s seed bank. The
short-lived experiments indicated a desire to engage
with ecological processes, making visual the elements
of diversity and seasonality pregnant in the design
and species selection. The test patches were a gesture
toward understanding plant behaviour in a site-spe-
cific context – most exotic grass species behave as
annuals, flowering in winter or spring, while nativesare largely summer-flowering perennials.^2 An argu-
ment was developed in regard to maintenance: that
while the meadow would require weeding, rather than
mowing, the underplanting proposed for the mature
figs would ameliorate issues of compaction, retaining
moisture and moderating soil temperature – a bargain
struck.
The idea of un-mowed grasses proved surpris-
ingly contentious. When I spoke with Sue Barnsley
she described calls received by the local council in
which irate taxpayers demanded to know why the
“lawn” was going un-mowed, the park lacking
adequate maintenance for its prominence. The calls
resulted in the addition of a sign and a naming of the
space, “native meadow,” to communicate that the
“loose” effect of the sometimes browning, blowzy
windblown grasses was intentional and designed.
Naming, even reluctantly, is important.^3 The
term “meadow” communicates a pastoral, romantic
vision. Prefacing it with “native” as an adjective seems
an attempt to make the effect of the messy (in certain
opinions) plantings palatable, by equating endemic
grassland with a historic, less threatening and more
familiar typology. The assertion may seem tenuous,
but consider how limited our language is in conveying
a depth of potential, in the narrow way we define a
positive result in relation to planting design. The
exhausted words bandied about – lush, green, rich –
wouldn’t describe a native meadow and outline a set
of outcomes that are narrower than what landscape
architects are capable of delivering.^4
In a broader sense, these words communicate
and construct imagery that excludes endemic or
native planting – feeding a hard-to-sustain addiction
to verdure over the potential for something subtle,
changing, seasonal or unpredictable. In a beautiful
book underpinned by a fierce linguistic obsession,
What is Landscape?, John R. Stilgoe suggests that the
term meadow “names openness,” or describes spaces
that act as “landing strips for sunlight,” both apt and
flexible descriptions of the experience of a place
defined by planting – descriptions crucially focused
on experience more than on appearance. In the
absence of an extensive professional nomenclature, it
is clear that the words we employ to describe planting
design are necessarily both generative and limiting.
Beyond necessitating a name, the vocal (if
limited) public reaction to the meadow not only
implies an aversion to a particular planting typology (a
kind of horticultural cringe), but also hints at a collec-
tive cultural or aesthetic amnesia. This relates not only
to the specific history of the site, in its previous incar-
nation as Cleveland Paddocks, and the echoes of that →LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA MAY 2017 29