The Australian Garden

Gardens in Australia have traditionally been modeled on European precedents or more recently attempted to recreate the seductive qualities of the Australian landscape. The Australian Garden by contrast uses the Australian landscape as its inspiration to create a sequence of powerful sculptural and artistic landscape experiences that recognize its diversity, breadth of scale and wonderful contrasts. Via these creative landscape compositions, the project seeks to stimulate and educate visitors into the potential use and diversity of Australian flora.

A primary theme through the garden design is the exploration and expression of the evolving relationship between Australians and their landscape and flora. The garden expresses this tension between Australians’ reverence and sense of awe for the natural landscape, and their innate impulse to change it, to make it into a humanly contrived form, beautiful yet their own work.

This theme is illustrated by two contrasting experiences. The western side of the garden takes its cues from the natural world and includes abstracted woodlands, sand gardens, treed hills, chasms and marsh gardens. Here the flowing forms of nature are the inspiration of the design. The Australian landscape with its qualities of mystery, age, tenacity, a touch of wildness, an element of feeling of earth, sky, wind and light play into the design.

The eastern side of the garden is clothed with ideas and images of a more human kind. Highly designed exhibition gardens line the central promenade, with themes of biodiversity, water conservation, and children’s exploration.

A richly patterned waterway is the mediating element between these natural and human derived gardens. This waterway consists of a sculptural escarpment wall by artist Greg Clarke which is a warm and richly coloured red rusted steel structure made up of separate interlocking components and a series of paving stones of soft warm colours with little tonal variation. The amount of water released in the waterway changes over time, voicing the characteristics of the Australian waterways and its unpredictable mannerisms.

The centerpiece of the Australian Garden is the Sand Garden. This dominant feature viewed upon arrival to the gardens represents the dry red centre of the Australian continent and forms a bold picture of open red sands and patterned low clipped vegetation. The garden conveys the spaciousness and the rhythmic patterns of arid inland Australian landscapes, in a bold and painterly manner. Visitors are invited to view but not enter this elusive landscape, creating a sense of mystery, distance and grandeur.

Adjacent to this expansive landscape is a series of parallel gardens that are designed as a tribute to Australia’s iconic and all pervasive Eucalypt. These gardens explore the rich diversity of the genus and demonstrate their more tactile and sensory qualities. Via meandering pathways visitors immerse themselves into an enclosed and ever changing experience.

The visitor experience is carefully choreographed to provide rich and diverse experiences, to reinforce a sense of engagement with the Australian landscape, from the bold to the intimate. Integrated artworks from renowned artists, Greg Clarke and Mark Stoner and Architects’ Kerstin Thompson and Greg Burgess compliment the landscape setting and provide visitors with arresting and convenient facilities.

The Australian Garden is the largest botanic garden devoted to the display of Australian flora, is now host to a vast collection of plants for scientific, educative, and conservation purposes. It plays a vital role in helping scientists and the public understand the history, present day uses and what the future may hold for plants in natural and urban environments. It embraces the importance of biodiversity and our increased understanding of the need to protect species and ecosystems to safeguard the world’s biological heritage.