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Display Garden Design (contd)
Garden Design Studio won a Silver Award for their sleek inner city style courtyard with clean lines and restrained, yet lush planting. A hanging bamboo screen shaded a central seating area. Good use of 'windows in the rendered walls created privacy while opening the garden to the house and site opened the garden.
Canterbury Courtyards used a plum rendered wall to set off a series of torsos and a classical water feature. As you would expect, the courtyard was perfectly executed and demonstrated good use of materials and planting in a tight space. Native Culture created a fairly predictable courtyard with that was chiefly of interest for the native plants.
Hortex staged three gardens, each showing a different approach to water conservation and management.
The 'Garden as a Stage' by ADF for Show sponsors IOOF was a disappointment. Even without the effect of overnight rain on the red draperies it was hard to see how this 'garden' would appeal to show visitors. The use of plants was a floral assembly and, apart from a wonderful lily sculpture, offered little.
A Silver Award went to the Tree and Shrub Growers of Victoria, Channel Nine and Debco for a large garden with an industrial edge. Rusted metal and copper spheres, alongside rustic hard-scaping and restrained planting created a harmonious whole. The garden was the venue for a series of media events and interviews and handled the resulting crowds well.
Student Competition
Competition for the Don Fleming Award, the student landscape design competition, was an all-woman event this year. It is an exciting event for the entrants as for most this is the first time they have seen one of their gardens built, and faced the challenges of realising the concept and coping with the practical challenges. This year's theme was 'A Living Masterpiece'
New Zealander Hannah Williamson showed a garden with bold colours and lush planting that was strongly evocative of the New Zealand landscape. In a garden based on the Kauaeranga Gorge Hannah created a garden that looks at nature as a living masterpiece. Giselle Barron worked from abstract collage to develop a contemporary, restrained space with clever planting and use of hard materials.
Sue Booker took the view that a masterpiece is something that affects people's lives, used the the World Trade Center tragedy as her theme. In a garden that used blocks of planting and metal girders against a simple background the tension and uncertainty of modern times was clear. Winner Susan Meli created a romantic garden for her them 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. Planting was flowing with weeping birches and willows along a water feature created from crazed mirrors.
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Susan Meli's Midsummer Nights' Dream | |
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Sleek city style from Garden Design Studio
Purple walls, restrained planting from Canterbury Courtyards
Tree & Shrub Growers garden had an industrial edge
Hannah Williamson's Kauaeranga Gorge Valley
Giselle Barron's abstract design
Sue Booker's World Trade Center |
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