Decolonizing the Garden – Country as Co-author, Park Orchards, Victoria
Built on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation
Realmstudios
Hands-on experience of working with the soil has guided Realmstudios director Jon Shinkfield practice as a landscape architect. Over a six-year period, Shinkfield worked on his previous residential property in Park Orchards, Victoria to develop a regenerative planting process that aimed to allow the landscape its natural agency in recovering the site’s endemic condition. The premise of the project, Decolonizing the Garden, was to “co-author” a living landscape. While unable to visit the site due to timing and the privacy concerns of the new owners, Jela Ivankovic-Waters spoke with Shinkfield about the process he undertook to transform the landscape of the site, the evolution of his approach to “co-authoring with Country,” and what learnings might come from the project that might be applied to wider design practice.
Jela Ivankovic-Waters – What was attractive about the site as a place to regenerate?
The 2,000-square-metre Park Orchards site is located in Melbourne’s outer Manningham, and . These were important building blocks for the garden as many residential sites in the area have been cleared of trees, shrubs and grasses for fire safety reasons. My first impressions were that these trees reflected the potential to recover the site’s previous composition as a grassy dry forest EVC that was situated at the head of a catchment that eventually linked to the Yarra River. As a site at the top of its catchment, it represents a rich opportunity to further the recovery downstream through time.
