The agenda to improve ecological function in hostile urban sites such as railway corridors, roadside verges, roundabouts and nature strips has often been undermined by limited budgets and maintenance access, along with failures of imagination. However, given that these sites add up to more than a third of public green space in Melbourne alone, it’s a mission that holds plenty of promise.1
Established in 2015, the Woody Meadow Project set out to find a low-cost, low-maintenance and resilient approach to urban greening.2 “Woody Meadows” are multi-layered and diverse shrub plantings using Australian native species, which are coppiced every two to four years to achieve rapid canopy cover, exclude weeds and promote flowering. The original research project evaluated the performances of 22 species planted at two Melbourne pilot sites: Birrarung Marr and Royal Park.3
Now, a new phase of the researchgovernments, Greater Western Water, Greening the Pipeline and the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning. “We took the pilot project and scaled it up,” says project lead Claire Farrell, an associate professor from the University of Melbourne’s Green Infrastructure Research Group. “It became about how to take this low-maintenance approach and make it relevant to landscapes that might have very different site conditions.”
