The MCG-sized garden set to make Melbourne’s arts precinct feel like a nature reserve

This story is part of the February 22 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

The idea is both brazen and shocking. It runs counter to all we’ve come to expect from public urban spaces in the 21st century. “Fill it with flowering plants” is just not the sort of thing we do with an open 18,000 square metres in the heart of one of Australia’s most built-up cities.

But that is exactly what’s planned for the outdoor component of the new Melbourne Arts Precinct. Rich tapestries of plants will spill over pathways and ripple in the breeze. Luxuriant flowers will turn into sculptural seed heads that will give way to new plants and more blooms. Bulbs will unfurl from the earth and butt up against herbaceous perennials that will weave around flowering grasses juxtaposed with annuals, succulents, small shrubs and trees.

When this garden opens to the public in 2028, there will be a constant succession of plants threaded around plants. Wilder, softer and fuller than what we usually see around town, it is expected to recast how we experience open spaces in Australian cities. This garden is set to snake around the centre of Melbourne’s key arts hub, an area currently being transformed in a $1.7 billion project funded by the Victorian government and philanthropists. While the precinct will extend from Federation Square to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and the Malthouse Theatre in Sturt Street, the Shrine of Remembrance in Birdwood Avenue and the Royal Botanic Gardens, the garden will be concentrated around the galleries, theatres and concert halls of St Kilda Road and Southbank Boulevard.

By connecting the NGV International with the new The Fox: NGV Contemporary (currently under construction and also set to open in 2028) and the Melbourne Arts Centre, this garden will function as both a public pathway and a living outdoor art exhibit in which plants, in all their seasonal, ever-changing glory, take centre stage. What this area won’t contain is mown lawn, bare woodchip mulch or shrubby monocultures. There will be none of the gaps you generally see between plants, and those chosen will include many more Australian species than usual.

You can sample the density and diversity to come in a pop-up test garden that has recently been established above the railway lines at the back of Federation Square. Here, raised beds are overflowing with some of the beauty and biodiversity planned for the final space. These display beds will keep evolving over the next few years so that the designers can gauge public responses to a range of planting mixes.

“We are trying to test as many plant families and flower forms as possible,” Farrell says. “We have deliberately not chosen a lot of succulents because we know they work.”  Credit: Simon Schluter

Little about this garden, being designed by the Australian-born international design studio Hassell in partnership with the New York-based design firm SO-IL, UK horticulturalists Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough, and plant expert Jac Semmler from the Melbourne company Super Bloom, is being left to chance. In this era of higher temperatures, unfamiliar weather patterns, species extinctions and increasing urban density, the garden is part of a worldwide push to reintroduce more vegetation to our cities. The High Line in New York, the Barbican arts centre and housing estate in London and the Lurie Garden in Chicago are just some places that have been filled with plants over recent decades.

Both visually spectacular and environmentally sustainable, these freeform-feeling landscapes are looser and less controlled than conventional city plantings. Don’t be fooled, however. As natural as these landscapes might look, they are anything but. The plants are carefully vetted and strategically arranged to ensure they cope with their conditions and, at the same time, pack maximum aesthetic punch.

‘In our streets, landscape architects generally only use a minimal plant palette of natives.’

Jon Hazelwood

Hassell principal Jon Hazelwood, the design director for the Melbourne Arts Precinct garden, says the space will be the most complex planting ever undertaken in public in Australia. It will be called Laak Boorndap, a name bestowed by traditional owner, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung language elder Aunty Gail Smith, who says that, to her, the name means “a beautiful place for all people to visit and recognise our Country and Wurundjeri ancestors”. Much of the garden’s beauty will stem from the unusually wide variety of species to be cultivated in it: about 500 types of plants, almost half of which are Australian and many of which have never been used in public-design projects. Hazelwood says the plants will be climate-change resilient and will make visitors feel as if they are immersed in nature, despite being in the middle of a high-density city.

Such a bountiful approach is only possible thanks to the inclusion – from the start – of horticulturalists with a strong appetite for diverse, wilder-style plantings. It also relies on cutting-edge research that is being conducted by the University of Melbourne. This research is looking at what plants will survive in the conditions to hand, while also providing a rich variety of textures, forms and flowers. It means the designers will be able to incorporate a wider palette of plants than is usually deployed in a public setting, where there is little tolerance for failure and therefore a tendency to play it safe with tried and true choices that are readily available.

“If we were designing this just ourselves as landscape architects, we would include maybe 40 species,” Hazelwood says. “In our streets, landscape architects generally only use a minimal plant palette of natives.”

Adding to the challenge is that Laak Boorndap is essentially located on a rooftop. This elevated garden will be built over roads and buildings, which means none of the plants will have the luxury of growing in the ground and will instead spend their lives in specially constructed, and invariably more constrained, spaces.

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If there is one thing we’ve discovered as Australian roof gardens have surged in popularity over the past 15-odd years, it’s that nothing about them is straightforward. Conditions in the sky are always more exacting than on the ground. When I climb onto the bitumen rooftop, where many of the plants being considered for Laak Boorndap are being tested, I feel the glare of the sun and whip of the wind. The garden beds are too shallow to hold much moisture. Up here, you hear the constant hum of traffic and regular rumble of trains. There are beguiling views but also vertigo-inducing heights: a fence skirts the perimeter but some of us keep our distance.

We’re at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley campus, which has been at the forefront of Australian horticultural research for 165 years. More specifically, we are on the very top of the campus’s main building. This roof is even higher than the demonstration green roof unveiled – as a research and teaching facility – at Burnley 12 years ago. The first of its kind in Australia, that roof (a striking space designed by Hassell in close collaboration with university academics) has, at various times over the years, been open to the public to illustrate how green roofs can work in the Australian climate.

A render of how Laak Boorndap will look, behind the NGV and Arts Centre.

But don’t expect to visit the Laak Boorndap research roof any time soon. It’s a strictly limited-numbers sort of place. To get there, I climb a set of steel steps that resemble plane stairs. But at the top, instead of a pressurised cabin, you find yourself in an open-air garden full of flowers and fragrance.

While the plants look colourful and pretty up here among the birds and appliances, such as heating and cooling units, this is no bucolic paradise. Far from being cosseted and cajoled, these plants are, in the words of the director of the Burnley campus, associate professor Claire Farrell, being “put through the wringer”. Native cornflowers, the Western Australian perennial Velleia foliosa, the showy succulent Calandrinia grandiflora, the shrub Ceanothus Blue Sapphire and the pincushion flower are just some of the plants being exposed to wind, heat and dryness on this roof.

There are 76 different plants in total, with four specimens of each growing in three test beds that are variously 10 centimetres, 15 centimetres and 20 centimetres deep. In keeping with this being a rigorous experiment, each bed is fitted with a number of highly sensitive technical devices. This might be a garden but it has science-lab vibes.

Fine blue cables snake over the surfaces of the beds to measure the temperature of the soil, or more particularly, the carefully composed free-draining substrate. Sensors sunk into this substrate assess the water content. A weather station positioned above keeps tabs on the ambient temperature, wind speed and rainfall, while plastic garden markers, containing individual QR codes, are placed in the soil beside each plant.

The conditions and behaviour of each plant are regularly assessed, with the findings passed onto Hazelwood, Semmler and the rest of the design team to help them decide what to include in the final garden. Farrell says the way this horticultural research is informing the design of Laak Boorndap is a big change from business-as-usual. “It’s the most exciting part of this project. We are not necessarily waiting for the writing of fully fleshed-out scientific reports,” she says. “The research outcomes are informing the design as it happens in a very dynamic way.”

Jon Hazelwood, Dean Schrieke and Claire Farrell are testing as many plant families as possible.Credit: Simon Schluter

When we speak, it’s too early for any plants to have been ruled out, but Farrell has her suspicions about some of the larger, softer-leafed ones that often require more tenderness than a rooftop garden can provide. “But maybe the research will tell us something different, who knows,” she says.

Farrell says the research also “pushes boundaries” by mixing almost equal numbers of natives and exotics. This native-non-native intermingling is in contrast to both conventional public gardens, which tend to focus on exotic plants, and some of the more recent experimental urban plantings, that are composed entirely of native ones.

The idea is to create natural sweeps of plants without drawing attention to their origins. Hazelwood and Semmler are wary of discussion about “Australian plants versus non-native plants”. They say their priority is to ensure there is a succession of resilient, aesthetically pleasing, pollinator-attracting plants – no matter where they’re from – all year round.

‘We want this garden to retain its wonder throughout the year. We want people to get lost in planting.’

Jac Semmler

But, while the garden reflects an international trend for landscapes that lure butterflies, bees and birds and which are freer and more ecologically sustainable than what has gone before, Semmler and Hazelwood say they are “very conscious of not plonking a New York High Line or a naturalistic European model” into Southbank. They want the garden to have “a very strong Australian identity” and would also like to see aspects of it applied to other public parks and gardens in cities around the country.

“We should have higher expectations of the planting in our cities,” Semmler says. “We forget how evocative plants are for people. Our hearts hunger for beauty, and people should be able to experience biodiversity, ecology and delight. We want this garden to retain its wonder throughout the year. We want people to get lost in planting.”

A render of the mega-garden that will thread its way through Melbourne’s arts precinct.

Meanwhile, Dr Dean Schrieke, a research fellow in green infrastructure at the University of Melbourne, climbs up to the highest Burnley roof five days a week, scanning QR codes and entering data on how each of the trial plants is going and whether it is in flower. He weeds while wearing surgical gloves, not to keep the soil sterile, but because of the science-lab mood of the place. Schrieke is also charting the progress of another 50 geophytes – plants that grow from bulbs, corms, tubers or rhizomes – that are growing in similarly rigorous test beds set up under rain-exclusion shelters on the ground.

Schrieke, Farrell and associate professor John Rayner, who is also helping to run the trials, have reduced the amount of water applied to all the test beds until the plants are just on the brink of experiencing drought stress. While previous Burnley research has established irrigation is essential for any Australian green roof that is not just composed of succulents, this study is looking at the minimum amount of water needed to produce a wide variety of healthy plants. The findings will build on previous Burnley studies into the viability of another 330 species on roofs.

“We are trying to test as many plant families and flower forms as possible,” Farrell says. “We have deliberately not chosen a lot of succulents because we know they work.”

This Burnley research will continue over the next two years, with additional trials – starting in nine months’ time – to assess how different combinations of plants work together and also how they might be cared for once Laak Boorndap starts being planted in about three years’ time. Although there’s an emphasis on using resilient plants that cope well in the Australian climate and don’t require a lot of water or other inputs in order to thrive, the garden itself will require a more dynamic approach to management than that taken in more conventional public plantings. While the public might delight in the abundance, they won’t tolerate a sense of chaos, which means regular interventions will be required to keep the balance of the different plants in check. This will include the cutting-back of some growth and the seeding – and then refining – of annual wildflowers. The timing of the ongoing management will vary across the garden, coinciding with the different plants’ flowering and dormancy times.

Plant expert Jac Semmler says “we should have higher expectations of the planting in our cities”.Credit: Simon Schluter

“It will require horticultural skills to curate the planting and to understand it,” Semmler says. “This is not a neat and tidy, static planting that will be maintained to always stay the same. We see this garden shifting and changing over time, and that requires a dynamic approach. But the expected level of care is not unrealistically high.”

Meanwhile, Hazelwood says the management of the space, which will have a range of irrigation levels applied to it, will require no more time or cost than that of other public plantings.

On every front, the aim is to make this garden different to what has gone before. There will be movement, fragrance, a multitude of heights, non-stop seasonal interest and a general understanding that visitors will feel the urge to touch what they see.

With a site so prominent and so big (Laak Boorndap will be almost as big as the Melbourne Cricket Ground) there is no room for error. Every small shrub and tree, herbaceous perennial, annual, biennial, succulent and geophyte, will have to pull its weight. “We have got to prove that this works from day one,” Hazelwood says.

A host of people are working to make that happen.

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