Train stations and car parks: The gardens proving beauty can be found anywhere
For two decades, Claire Takacs has been photographing the world’s best gardens. In the golden light of dawn and dusk she captures the exciting, enchanting ways in which people grow plants.
But now that prolonged droughts, torrential rainfall and extreme temperatures are changing how we garden, Takacs, who grew up in Victoria and spends lengthy periods working overseas, says she is finding beauty in spaces that have been made with more than aesthetics in mind.
Kurt Wilkinson has created enchanting but robust effects in his Adelaide Hills garden Credit: Claire Takacs
For her new book, Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for Our Future she photographs projects that alleviate flooding, survive blistering or provide green respite for hospital patients. One of the gardens in her new book is at a Sydney train station, another in a new housing estate in Texas and one located on a roundabout in Copenhagen. A disused shipyard in Berlin, a former gasworks in Sweden and what was once the world’s largest woodchip mill in Tasmania are typical of the settings for the horticultural enterprises she documents.
Takacs says that she and London-based landscape architect Giacomo Guzzon, with whom she collaborated on Visionary, initially envisaged including 30 to 40 private gardens and public landscapes, but the more spaces they covered the more that kept turning up. By the end, Takacs had photographed close to 80 spaces, all of which work within their environmental constraints.
This relaxed Melbourne garden designed by Amanda Oliver is dynamic and resilientCredit: Claire Takacs
“I have learned that beauty lies in seasonality and in harshness. There is beauty in brown and in gravel,” she writes in the book’s introduction. She says she sees beauty in car parks, in recycling industrial land, in wildness and restraint. She finds beauty in spaces that provoke us to think about how we live and garden.
It is a lesson for all gardeners in accepting what is. Nothing – not ground vibrations from a nearby highway, pathogens in your soil, nor extreme temperatures – need put you off your game. Readers will find inspiration aplenty in this very gentle call to arms.
Take the Adelaide Hills garden of Kurt Wilkinson, a three-hectare hilltop site that is hot and dry in summer, exposed all year round and has the water mould Phytopthora in its soil. All of Wilkinson’s first plantings – the perennials and grasses used with such aplomb by designers like Piet Oudolf – failed.
So, he stopped watering and turned to the roadside for inspiration. He interspersed informal lashings of succulents, leucadendron, lavender and other hardy fair with formally clipped shrubs and trees, such as Cupressus sempervirens. The wild effects Wilkinson has created are enchanting and this exciting garden teems with life across the seasons.
Much smaller but again dynamic and resilient is the suburban Melbourne garden designed by Amanda Oliver, where the emphasis is on leaf shapes and textures, and where plants sway in the wind, creep over the pool edge and cascade over pathways. All of the perennials, grasses, succulents and trees are dry-tolerant but a drip-irrigation system keeps them lush during prolonged hot, dry periods thereby lowering the air temperature through evapotranspiration.
The Sydney Metro Planting Trial is experimenting with new plantings in the public sphereCredit: Claire Takacs
Another naturalistic, random-feeling layout can be seen at a suburban railway station plaza in Sydney that aims to increase biodiversity and sustainability while also making our cities more attractive. In 2022 designers Jon Hazelwood (of Hassell) and John Rayner and Claire Farrell (University of Melbourne) planted 100 different herbaceous, predominantly native, species together with coppiced shrubs and began photographing the results every two weeks.
What this Sydney Metro Planting Trial has found is that weeding, watering and plant replacements have been significantly reduced compared with the plantings conventionally used in urban public spaces.
While not every garden has had its development documented so rigorously, all the gardens in the book rely on plant species adapted to their environment. Many use local stones and gravels that give a garden character and connect it to its location.
In a former shipyard-turned-private garden in Berlin, for example, salvaged pieces of concrete have been rearranged into a piece of sculpture. Repurposed concrete chunks are used as boulders in the garden of a Los Angeles workshop, while the topography of numerous spaces has been altered with broken up concrete and rubble.
This Berlin garden designed by Anselm Reyle, Tanja Lincke and Das Reservat incorporates sculpture made from concrete found on siteCredit: Claire Takacs
Across the world designers have also introduced water and plants for wildlife, re-used garden debris (for example as mulch on paths) and addressed how we produce food.
While these gardens are across different climates and have been made in an array of styles, they all offer ideas for making gardens that will help see us into the future.
Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for Our Future (Hardie Grant Books) by Claire Takacs with Giacomo Guzzon, available now.
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