Harvest & Potter

Vegetable beds raised, a place to harvest and potter. Perennial tufts punctuate green and grey swathes. Blue tongues forage for crunchy shelled snails.

The brief

Create spaces for the family and fauna. Plant a garden teeming with an eclectic mix to attract bees and provide habitat for the resident blue tongues. This was their spot first. Tuck away the council rubbish bins so they're quick to wheel out but not a feature. Find the informal spaces to sit and chat to the neighbours. 

The space

It's become an unusual and unspoken practice to hide vegetable gardens in the backyard, hiding them from the street. On increasingly shrinking Sydney blocks, we hoped to reverse the trend and position the act of growing food in centre stage. We did away with fences and let planting spill out to reclaim the verge and expand the perceived size of the front garden. Blur the lines between public and private green space. Areas of stabilised deco granite were carved out, providing wide access paths to the garage, vegetable beds and bin storage.

Dense swathes of planting create sheltered networks for the resident skinks and blue tongues to perform their busywork of foraging around the garden and drinking up the sun. We terraced the gently sloping land to create usable space to garden and edges to perch, from which the human inhabitants can look out to the river or have a yarn with a neighbour. Drinking up the sun also encouraged.

Location | Earlwood, NSW 
Scope | Concept Design, Construction Documentation, Construction Services
Year | 2018