Nature's Pantry
Three gardens in one, designed and built for the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show 2024: an ornamental productive garden, a balcony garden and a biodiverse native garden, each full of ideas that scale to any space.
- Event
- Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show 2024
- Supported by
- A grant from Open Gardens Victoria
- Role
- Designed and built by Sarah
- Theme
- Three gardens in one: ornamental productive, balcony and native
- Featured on
- Better Homes and Gardens (TV), and in Pip Magazine
The brief
A living pantry: a garden offering genuine sustenance for people, and for insects and wildlife. The challenge was to make it feel abundant and beautiful rather than instructional, and to show ideas visitors could take home and use in a garden of any size, from a balcony to a large backyard.
Three gardens in one.
The ornamental productive garden integrated edibles with structural evergreen foliage and fruit trees, so it looked good all year, not just at harvest. The balcony garden showed how much can be grown and enjoyed in a small space, with a tea garden in a reclaimed planter, seating, hanging plants and clever use of vertical space. The native garden was biodiverse and tough, with hardy native plants and water to draw in birds, bees and other wildlife.
Sustainability ran through all three. The garden was built from reclaimed and sustainable materials, including salvaged timber, repurposed pots and a relocatable pallet-racking pergola, with sculpture throughout. Wicking beds, an integrated composting system and careful use of water showed sustainable gardening ideas in practice, and native bee hotels and habitat boxes made the garden's ecosystem visible rather than hidden.
The build
A display garden has to look finished on opening day, with no establishment period and no time to reconsider on site. Every level, material and plant was resolved on paper before construction began, then built to a fixed deadline. It is the same discipline I bring to every design: a garden fully resolved before anyone starts building, so the result matches the plan.
The outcome
Nature's Pantry showed that a productive, biodiverse garden can be as considered and beautiful as any ornamental space. The ideas were designed to scale, from a balcony to a large garden, and to send visitors home with something they could actually use.
Abundant from day one.
