Jury comment
As our cities become ever more dense and our lives ever more frenetic, places of retreat where stillness, mystery and hermetic pursuits can be explored take on new significance. These small domestic gardens in Adelaide’s inner city offer another way to enjoy being outside. They have a difficult-to-define richness, by exclusion rather than an attempt to pack too many experiences into such small spaces. They display the work of a quietly assured hand, building on a knowledge of the local canon, executing careful and considered compositions with a restrained palette of plants and materials. These are quiet and sophisticated places that belie their small scale. Selected artworks are placed for appreciation at different scales and the height of the planting emphasizes an empty sky as part of the experience. They are finely crafted and simple to maintain and somehow seem to embody a distinctly Adelaide character.
For more coverage, read Aylwen Dennis’s review from Landscape Architecture Australia 142, May 2014.
