Rosie Halsmith – Could you tell me about yourself, and how you came to be a landscape architect?
Robyn Barlow – I studied horticulture at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley campus. After that, I did garden maintenance and garden design. Then, I completed a couple of semesters at RMIT in landscape architecture – which I loved – before moving to New South Wales, to 200 acres of bushland along the Bega River. I continued to design gardens in rural New South Wales and worked parttime at a local nursery. Fifteen years later, I [returned to] RMIT to finish the landscape architecture course. I wanted to study landscape architecture because I wanted to broaden my outlook within landscape.
In New South Wales, I worked on quite largescale residential projects, one being our own place, which was not connected to the grid at all. Living in the bush was great because that’s where I really learnt about biodiversity.
RH – You mentioned that you studied landscape architecture to broaden your outlook. What does this broadened outlook mean to you?
RB – To see how landscape is helpful, and to see how people can be helpful to the landscape. At RMIT, we learnt a lot about working within different scales, identifying systems and connections–I use that now, even when I’m working on a small garden. When designing with and for biodiversity, this is a big consideration.
Studying landscape architecture gave me better tools to be able to understand site. I learnt to do a lot more site analysis, to really identify the qualities of a site: how the space functions, how a client wants it to function, how the people who are living in the space respond to it and how the landscape can change that.
RH – How do you define biodiversity? What are your strategies for designing landscapes with high biodiversity value?
I see biodiversity
