Melbourne gardens: Bulleen’s Heide Art Museum to open huge ‘healing garden’ after coronavirus
Parklands near the Yarra River are set to be transformed into a special space for visitors to relax and stimulate the senses when coronavirus restrictions are lifted. Find out where it’s going to be.
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Plans have been unveiled for a giant ‘healing garden’ to be built near the banks of the Yarra River to help Melburnians get a touch of Zen after coronavirus.
Bulleen’s Heide Museum of Modern Art will transform part of its 6.5ha of parkland for the space, which will feature scented entries and five zones.
It will boast a kitchen garden, wild and seasonal plants, indigenous plants and a tactile water play area to stimulate senses.
The project, designed by the museum and landscape architects Openwork, has been more than a year in the planning and taken on a new meaning following the coronavirus outbreak.
Its total cost is unknown but it is being funded by the museum’s benefactors and proceeds from a fundraiser lunch last year.
Heide’s artistic director Lesley Harding said the project was a nod to founder Sunday Reed’s love of gardening.
She said it would include some of Ms Reed’s original roses which she and husband John planted on site in the 1950s.
“Her garden was a creative outlet and a place of respite and rejuvenation,” Ms Harding said.
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“Like Sunday, the Heide team today recognise that gardens and nature can help improve people’s wellbeing and restore a sense of equilibrium, something that will be particularly important in the coming months.”
Openwork director Mark Jacques said the garden would be “a space defined by surrender and escape from the everyday, a place to recharge and step away from normal behaviours.”
Minor works have begun for the gardens which are tipped to be open by the end of the year.