T
oo often in landscape architecture the
animate nature of plants is forgotten. Plant
“material” is treated like any other in service
of a spatial and textural design intent. Using
only a minimal selection, plants are used to land-
scape. The Charles House garden by Bush Projects
was designed distinctly as a garden as opposed to a
landscape. It employs plants in all their glory and is
vividly alive. Rather than mass plantings, it is full of
eclectic combinations of diverse species planted in
mixed drifts, or collections of plants, some of which
are repeated while others are one-off plantings.
Plant selection is not limited by categories, such as
indigenous, native, exotic – in this garden there is
an attunement to the qualities of plants carefully
sourced, selected, curated and subtly combined.
The garden is ground for a new and very large
creature of a house in Melbourne’s Kew, designed by
Austin Maynard Architects. The modern, verging on
medieval, two-storey building sits proudly on the site,
leaving a wide strip of garden along the length of the
block. Its black “skin” is an accumulation of overlap-
ping slate tiles. The skin folds back to reveal the
windows. The tessellation continues to the ground
adjacent to the building with grasscrete paving
interfiled with Dichondra repens (kidney weed). Two
rectilinear ponds run perpendicular to the house, the
reflective surface continuing vertically as cuts, or tall
windows, into the building. Although there is conti-
nuity of texture between the building and garden, the
lightness and liveliness of the garden offers perfect
contrast to the black and heavy body of the dwelling.
And even though the garden is a setting for the build-
ing, once you are within the garden, the scale inverts
and the garden becomes a world in itself. The building
becomes a wall and the garden a volume.
This garden is a call to the senses. The plant
palette is subtly transformed by mixed drifts from the
front of the garden to the back. The front seems wild.
The largely indigenous planting with the addition of
the Doryanthes excelsa (gymea lily) extends to include
the nature strip. The messy “noisiness” of the front is
at odds with the manicured houses either side in the
orderly Kew street. When I visited the garden the
clumps of grasses, which were above head height,
were rustling in the wind, their inflorescences lit with
setting golden light. As you move deeper into the
garden, native and exotic plants appear in surprising
combinations. Lagerstroemia (crepe myrtle) is
adjacent Miscanthus x giganteus and Wigandia cara-
casana, working tricks with depth of field and scale.
At the back, herbs and vegetables are added to the
mix. The multitude of shifting textures invite eyes to
journey and yet the shifts are subtle and almost
imperceptible as the planting also reads as a whole. It
is clear the designers are plant lovers, who play with
textures and combinations toward spatial and sensual
ends. The multitude of plant species will become
home to many non-human occupants, which are more
likely to thrive in a biodiversity of species.
As you move along the length of the garden,
which is ostensibly a wide strip of land along the
side of the house, your feet register the continual
shifting of levels. These transitions occur through a
language of folding planes rather than steps, allowing
accessibility. The ground reads as terrain, somehow
connected to the larger geological layers. This tactic
of continual transition informs all aspects of the
garden; the ground plane, plant combinations, the
transitions between materials and the negotiation
of different kinds of occupation. There is a flattened
area at the back, at the highest point on the block,
which is planted with Zoysia tenuifolia, lawn for
lounging and lolling. Large granite rocks are carefully
placed throughout the garden and within the lawn to
create informal play areas for the owner’s children.
Bush Projects, a collaboration between Bonnie
Grant and Sarah Hicks, is an emerging practice. The
duo doesn’t just complete the drawings and hand
them over to the contractor – they also source the
plants, select the rocks and work with the contractor
to site and rearrange things. “It’s like we are still
drawing it as we go,” Sarah says. The design is not
complete until the garden is handed over to the
client. Such care and attention to detail is often
considered inefficient and yet it is the very thing that
makes the planted design feel like a garden. It is just
one year old and already fully fledged. I wonder how
it will mature? How will it be looked after? And
how will the clients garden? There was a clue at the
entrance, where a tomato plant had been tucked in
next to a Leptospermum petersonii (lemon-scented tea
tree). The diversity of the garden’s plant selection
allows for such anomalies. It will be wonderful to see
how this hands-on mode of practice translates to
larger-scale public projects.
Charles House
Garden, Kew,
Victoria
—
Bush Projects
- Scleranthus biflorus (cushion bush)
grows around granite boulders and
clumps of grasses capture the golden
morning light.
- The front section of the garden
hosts largely indigenous plantings,
with the addition of Doryanthes
excelsa (gymea lily), and extends
to include the nature strip.
3–4. Dichondra repens (kidney weed)
pokes through grasscrete paving while
a green carpet of groundcovers is
punctuated with tufts of strappy leaf
plants, such as Dianella tasmanica
(Tasman flax-lily).
42 MAY 2017 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA
