The Melbourne Pollinator Corridor (MPC) is a large-scale landscape project undertaken by a non-landscape architect. The eight-kilometre wildlife corridor links Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens and Westgate Park via a growing number of small, community-led street gardens. Its founder, Emma Cutting, says it is held together by the transformative effects of care. The project has established interconnections across ecology and community in South Melbourne and rewritten the rules of streetscape design in the local council area, demonstrating levels of community investment and empowerment not typically achieved through landscape architecture projects. And it all started small.
The MPC was initiated in 2019 with a prototype garden. It currently comprises 20 gardens; Cutting aims to realize 200 by the end of 2024 and has distributed 40 “Corridor Kits” to support this process. The larger initiative that the MPC belongs to – the Heart Gardeninggardens and comprises over 8,000 plants. “[The project] joyfully connects humans to humans, humans to nature and nature to nature through street gardening,” Cutting says. The gardens occupy a range of site types, including council land (nature strips, which are the maintenance responsibility of the adjacent owner-occupier), government land (social housing landscapes) and privately owned public land (carparks).
