How to plan a garden in a changing climate

It’s officially time to start planning for the seasons ahead and landscape architects Michael Wright and Catherine Rush are steeling themselves for drought, fire, and dramatic storms. It may be winter, but the directors of Melbourne-based design practice Rush Wright Associates are already thinking about summer, and what they’re after is a garden that can weather anything.

But that’s not all. The couple also want their garden plans to be affordable, feel relaxing, improve with age and require little to no maintenance. A tall order you might say, but they’re making it happen.

A country garden that can withstand lengthy dry spells and regenerate after fire.Credit: Michael Wright

Despite being located in Glenluce, in the highlands of central Victoria, Wright says their new garden, carefully designed for a changing climate, could be adapted for any location.

While the exact plants to use will depend on your local weather conditions, Wright says the underlying structure of this garden, which can withstand lengthy dry spells and will regenerate after fire, is easily replicable and could be made relatively cheaply in any rural, coastal or urban spot.

There is no fussy edging and no regular clipping. It’s not completely wild, but it doesn’t look highly gardened either. It is as enchanting as any garden that feels part of the landscape itself.

Wright and Rush have long used their country property as a testing ground for their landscape designs. Over the 21 years they’ve been in business, they have established forests of food and wide native corridors, often using whatever materials are on hand.

There is no fussy edging and no regular clipping.Credit: Michael Wright

Wright says their overriding philosophy is always the same: set things in process, then see how little you can do. Unlike highly manicured spaces where “all you can see is the labour involved”, Wright says this more natural style of gardening “lends itself to a feeling of relaxation”.

The new part of the garden, made to survive both drought and fire, was inspired by the shifting sand dunes of Wyperfeld National Park, in the semi-arid north-western Victoria, as well as the mallee heath habitat of Ngarkat Conservation Park in South Australia.

On what was previously a wide expanse of flat lawn, Wright and Rush now have sand paths and undulating garden beds. These beds are filled with mallee form eucalypts that will be coppiced, or periodically cut back to the ground, interspersed with low-flammability plants, such as saltbushes and native succulents. Grass trees (Xanthorrhoea ‘Supergrass’, which can regenerate even if their trunks are burnt) are thread between self-sowing paper daisies.

While all these plants can do it tough, Wright and Rush have another trick up their sleeves to make this space even more resilient in periods of little or no rainfall: all the paths double as water-storing reservoirs.

The sand paths double as water-storing reservoirs.Credit: Michael Wright

These paths-cum-trenches were the first part of the garden to be constructed when Wright, Rush and landscape architect Thomas Gooch started work on the space in late 2020. A maze of meandering channels, each 30 to 40 cm deep, was dug into the ground and the soil that was removed (a heavy, volcanic clay) was mounded on either side of the trenches to create mini dune-like garden beds.

The trenches were then filled with a 20 cm-deep layer of 53 mm stones – the type used in rail track construction – and were covered with a geotextile. This permeable fabric was then topped with a 15 cm-deep layer of washed river sand, so that if you didn’t know what was going on down below, you would say the pathways are pure sand.

Wright likes the feel of walking on the sand with bare feet, but is also happy with the way it dries out so fast that both annual and perennial weeds are suppressed. Because the stone-filled trenches below retain water for long periods, the surrounding plants can use it gradually and thereby make the most of our increasingly heavy but widely spaced summer storms.

Attainable gardens that can stand up to climate change should be high on everyone’s agenda and Wright hopes this approach inspires others to toughen up their act.

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