VIEW FROM ABOVE.
On the atlas, there it is, Australia a vast island slowly floating northwards parting the Pacific and Indian Oceans. A vast desert at its heart, while on its ocean coastlines a rim of diverse floral regions abound. If one was to build great garden reflecting the great diverse flora of the continent, how big would it have to be and would it be feasible?
This is, like one of those classroom projects where a project is trying to reflect a reality on a 1 to 1 basis e.g. having a map on a 1to 1 scale. Impossible and impractical I hear you say. What about some kind of reduced world?- a Lilliputian representation . Then we are merely moving into a disneyfication of reality . Disney World despite its charm and appeal to childhood does not make good gardens.
Great gardens are usually powered by a vision, an understanding of mans’ relationship to nature. Man’s power and control over nature is evident in the great gardens of France, Vaux le Vicomte, and Versailles …. , while the English Landscaped garden is reflective of a harmony between man and nature. Wordsworth and Capability Brown are kindred spirits.
In my two previous articles I explored the search by Australian gardeners to create gardens typical of an Australian flora .An Australian garden should only have Australian plants. What if one started from such an extreme premise?. It is not a statement of gardening jingoism but in these environmentally aware times it may be the right thing to do, right plant in the right place , a garden that recreated and represented the Australian species in their own habitats. Cranbourne is such a garden and is the brainchild of the director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens Dr. Phil Moors.
The Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne was opened in May 2006 to great acclaim, has won many architectural prizes and is now one of the most visited sites in Australia.
As a prequel to this great public success ,our own private odyssey through some personal contacts, found us as guests of Phil and his charming wife Debbie and were given a behind the scenes tour of the Cranbourne site in October 2005.
Six months away from a grand opening the main outlines of the garden was nearing completion ,the visitors’ centre , the vast red central desert garden, the spectacular Rockpool Waterway which has the greatest and longest sculptural piece ,standing like a great escarpment beside the waterway.
Now as I write on New Year’s Eve 2006 Cranbourne is a wonderful success and can be viewed, with wonderful descriptions of the design and plants on the very comprehensive website. Just load www.rbg.vic.gov.au/australian-garden and even on the internet marvel at the great achievement of it.
I was there before it was finally completed and I give only a viewpoint as a garden thinker reflecting on what I saw. Time has elapsed so therefore this piece will tend to be more reflectively intellectual rather being preoccupied with plant nomenclature. Those plants are on the website.

Most great gardens have one viewing point be it from a terrace or great windows looking south or from some great height where the maker looks back at the great achievement of it all. Cranbourne doesn’t disappoint on the viewpoints. It has many.
The central viewpoint is from the VISITORS CENTRE, not a great house but having more the look of a stockade. The publicity states that the “weathered timbered building has been designed to give tree top experience for visitors” It is now among the trees , probably a reference to those frontier days. The wooden building is louvered throughout keeping it naturally cool thus saving on expensive air conditioning plant already anticipating the immanent era of low carbon footprints.
From parapets and windows one looked out on a mini botanical Australia stretching to a blue horizon. The Red desert Garden , seemingly natural, was as deliberately constructed as an Elizabethan knot garden . Carefully built sand crescents , presumably made of man made materials and then encrusted with sand . ON the plains were salt ceramic sculptures representing the salt lakes of dry regions. The artist worked from templates informed by aerial pictures. Here was art taking a lesson from nature. The space was drawing literally from something Australian _ an Australian sensibility once rooted in a European view of nature, now turning to an Australian vision.
While visiting the NGV Art gallery in Melbourne I discovered the landscapes of the Australian Artist Fred Williams. The garden before me had the same feel
Williams has been described “as Australia’s greatest landscape artist. Williams clarifies our vision develops our understanding, defines our land” Here is a landscape reminiscent or maybe informed by Australia’s modern artists, a garden that in its own mission statement has a touch of that visionary approach.
Where are the plants? They are now there and here I am merely repeating the website.
“ –mass plantings of Acacia binervia and spinifex sericeus are used to stabilise the sandhills. The lower slopes are covered by a carpet of muntries (Kunzea pomifera), the fruit used for food by the Aborigines.”
The description continues with a plant inventory of the red rockery which overlooks the desert space on the west. I include these plants since this is garden plant publication.
“ planting in this area includes the Albany Daisy, Kangaroo Paw ( a plant that can be seen in the car park of Fernhill Gardens Co. Dublin) , Pincushions, Pineapple Bush, Rope rush, Grass tree and other rockery plants.”
When we were there this central Red Garden was devoid of plants and could only be viewed from the terrace of the Visitors’ centre. It was a space for reflection, a necessary quiet moment before one began to explore the garden.
From this initial quiet we turned to the spectacularly active ROCKPOOL WATERWAY, which is representative of the river landscapes of Eastern Australia .Framed by a slope of newly planted Australian red smooth-barked Apple( Angophora costata) , three fountains bubbled up in a great white spume of water . The resulting stream gushes down over a computer designed surfaced stream made up of square concrete pavers. These are of three different thicknesses Some are seemingly level with the water level, others are submerged and some pavers stand above the water , inviting a child or even an adult to walk across, but then like an 18th century garden joke the water increases in flow and the unsuspecting sojourner turns and runs to the bank with their feet wet. “No worries” .It is Australia not Ireland.
Stone seats provide a chance to enjoy the stream but there is more, much more. The river is dominated by a monolithic iron cliff. This is an iron sculpture stretching the length of the stream. Here one moves into superlatives. It is reported to be the longest and largest sculpture in the world. It seems like a large Redstone one sided canyon something that Ned Kelly might have spent along lifetime forging. It is a tour de force of sculpture within a garden setting. When one arrives at the source pool one looks back up the stream
Figure 1 ceramic tiled flat sculptures representing salt lakes.
Figure 2 Spumes of water herald the beginning of the stream. The Visitor’s Centre is in the background.
Figure 3 The monolithic sculpture overlooks the computer driven stream.
Figure 4 The end of the sculpture. Note the fine finishes to all the surfaces: the waterfall, the copper pipes in the sculpture, the steel decking and the gabions at the end of the slope
Figure 4 The end of the sculpture. Note the fine finishes to all the surfaces: the waterfall, the copper pipes in the sculpture, the steel decking and the gabions at the end of the slope
Figure 5 Master of all he sees. Director Phil Moors explains the concepts of the project.
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Figure 6 A grass tree (Xanthorrhoea) is nurtured by a little copper piping back to robust health.
Figure 7 The already maturing rock garden representative of the flat land river environments.
Figure 8 The garden's burgeoning nursery .There are over 100,000 plants in the planted up garden.
, it is cascading in a loud torrent down its course and then it slows to a quiet flow and the final waterfall caught by the wind collapses into a small wave. Silence.
Now we climbed onto the northern hills (man made) to view the central Red Garden from the other side the native saltbush was planted into hessian to contain sandy soil. The hill was topped by a deep recessed waddi complete with a termite mound.
There was a constant reminder that this was garden in the face of nature’s incompatibility to any plant imposition on it. Trying to shape dry river beds on slopes with plastic edgings ended with the plastic fraying buckling and breaking. Ancient transported Grass trees and patently very expensive found it difficult to adapt to the sand. Luckily they were saved by gentle watering. When we were there, there were coils of fine water tubing at the base of each Grass tree. To make sure every tree was at home all the trunks were fire blackened.
From viewing the website all these adaptation problems seem to have been successfully sorted. We turned toward the Visitor’s Centre and we were now passing through the well planted Western Australian Rock Garden and like a home key in a piece of music we were returning to the familiar flora of our first few weeks ( see article in July edition)Darwinias , boronias leschenaultia, melaleucas and so on ----. Seeing these flowering plants one had a sense of seasonality not that emphasised in Australia’s flora .
We were fortunate to experience a great gardening project near its completion – the creation of a unique Australian gardening aesthetic- sustainable and ecological.
Is there a lesson for us here in Ireland? Could one foresee a great Irish Garden project representative of all our unique habitats bog lands, woodlands, fields, hedges mountainsides? The Botanic Gardens have an educational mini version, but for the present let us protect and cherish our own native habitats.