Forest Edge Garden
2016 National Award of Excellence - Garden
2014 New South Wales Award of Excellence - Garden
Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture
Design restraint is an important tool in the landscape architecture profession, and Forest Edge uses this tool to perfection. The approach has been to bring together the site’s geology, flora and aspect, along with the transitional patterns of fire and drought, to deliver a garden that draws its aesthetic appeal from the landscape in which it sits. The design focuses on resilience, from careful species selection to careful water management regimes.
Forest Edge maintains all the usual elements of a residential garden, but it delivers these in a way that brings long-term appreciation of the wider landscape and a desire to manage and protect its delicate ecological attributes.
Design steps away from the traditional approach to residential garden design as a structuring of function and preconceived ideas of the cultivated garden onto a site. Instead, the approach has been to read the specifics of site, the geology, flora, aspect and patterns of fire and drought that shape this piece of land.
The shape of the ridge terrain, location of existing trees and aspect informed the structuring of a series of clearings around the main buildings, that mediate between the cultural space of “the house” and the natural in the bush beyond.
