The 100-year-old village where gardens are a point of connection
As long as there have been cities, people have been reimagining how we might live in them. Co-ops with communal kitchens, apartments with shared gardens and whole suburbs engineered to foster social interaction have been established.
As populations keep growing and cities sprawl wider, the desire for alternative forms of housing is only stepping up. All over Australia you can find design competitions, challenges and architectural commissions looking at how we can make our new homes more sustainable and affordable, and how these homes might help us live longer, healthier lives.
The best ideas have gardens filtering through. These gardens might be large and communal or so small they are for looking at rather than lingering in. Some are entirely made up of raised vegetable beds. Others even have an orchard.
An internal stone wall and gate in the garden of Jen Vardy.Credit: Justin McManus
With the NSW government having recently invited architects from around the world to compete with designs for “pattern book” Australian houses for the 21st century, and with the National Gallery of Victoria unveiling its 2024 architecture commission that considers new ways of building smaller homes next month, it’s timely to consider one of the more trailblazing urban design experiments of last century.
A century ago, the late great landscape designer Edna Walling, only in her 20s, created a village on what was then farmland in Mooroolbark in Melbourne. She imagined a community of like-minded people living in simple cottages nestled into a leafy, undulating landscape. There would be thickets of birches and groups of spiraeas. Everything would feel harmonious and natural. She called it Bickleigh Vale.
You can see how this 10-hectare project stands up when eight of its gardens are opened to the public next weekend.
One of the first things you will notice in this place of unpaved lanes and rich, rambling planting is how very neighbourly it is. It’s hard to see where one garden starts and the next begins. Small gates positioned in the fences between properties provide for easy house-to-house access. So smothered in climbers and shrubs are many of these fences that they don’t necessarily read as boundary lines. Everywhere, there are uninterrupted landscape views.
Just as Walling vetted all those who bought into this village, current-day resident Jen Vardy says Bickleigh Vale’s inhabitants remain a great community.
“Everyone is interested in this style of landscaping and in Edna Walling. We don’t all live in each other’s pockets, but we regularly borrow sugar and eggs and, if we’re digging up plants, we share them,” Vardy says.
Edna Walling once lived in the house in which Vardy and her family now live. Credit: Justin McManus
They also band together for working bees to maintain the laneways and quarterly meetings to discuss various other aspects of Bickleigh Vale. This village is not for the faint-hearted.
Vardy lives with her husband and four children in the house Walling herself lived in from 1951 until 1967. Their land stretches over a huge 5000 square metres. Vardy describes it as “a little bit of country in the city”.
Their garden has a sweeping lawn and garden beds teeming with magnolias, silver birches, crab apples, maples, camellias, hydrangeas, hellebores and spring flowering bulbs. There are stone walls and steps, a pond, flagstones and arbours. It feels leisurely and harmonious.
It is the same in many of the surrounding gardens. Walling, who began building her first Bickleigh Vale home and garden in 1920, ensured a consistency of style that remains today. This sense of unity extends over the different gardens and across the public lanes on which these gardens sit. The village’s winding streets are lined with native plantings – including eucalypts and wattles – just as Walling liked.
A gate that joins Vardy’s garden with that of her neighbour.Credit: Justin McManus
While gardens are ever-changing, and it can be difficult to maintain a designer’s original ideas 100 years on, Vardy says she always keeps Walling’s views in mind.
“I think, how would Edna prune that or would she have planted this? Most villagers feel that we are really caretakers of these gardens and like to maintain her vision. We are all sensitive to her style and aesthetic.”
High-density living this might not be, but how good if the latest alternative housing strategies engendered this much enthusiasm next century?
Eight gardens in Bickleigh Vale Village will be open October 12-13, 2024.
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