The Healing Garden, an outdoor restorative space at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, has opened. Designed by Openwork, the garden revitalizes the current planting on the footprint of Sunday Reed’s original kitchen garden adjacent to the cottage that formed her and John Reed’s long-term residence.
When the Heide Musem of Modern Art was constructed, the productive garden was relocated nearby on the site’s lower plains. Since then, the original kitchen garden has been replanted with a diverse mix of rainforest species, native bush foods, and ornamental flowering plants, that express an eclectic mix of planting styles and an experimental approach to gardening. The Healing Garden begins a new planting regime that amplifies the site’s existing verdant medley.
Seating created from leftover limestone offers quiet places to sit and relax.
Image: Clytie Meredith
The design incorporates six distinct clusters of planting styles set within the garden’s original layout of paths created by Sunday Reed and beneath the canopies of eucalypts planted by John Reed. The various clusters of plantings facilitate different sensory experiences, while leftover limestone from the museum’s construction has been used to create seating for visitors to sit.
A collection of scented plants mark the garden’s entrance; a kitchen garden of edible plants blends into the museum’s current working kitchen garden; a haptic play garden celebrates textural plants and water play; and a bush garden expands on the garden’s existing collection of indigenous edible and healing pants. The largest section of the site– the “meadow” – draws on the herbaceous garden style pioneered by Gertrude Jekyll, with native and exotic flower plants that highlight seasonal change. A large geological water table forms the heart of the garden space.
Bursts of colour at the Healing Garden at the Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Image: Clytie Meredith
A view through the garden where herbaceous plantings recall the style of Gertrude Jekyll, an influence on the Reeds.
Image: Clytie Meredith
“Combining existing site structures and plants with a new plant palette, the design celebrates Sunday Reed’s experimental planting ethos and her passionate understanding that a garden is restorative for both physical and mental wellbeing,” said Openwork landscape architect Elizabeth Herbert.
“The Healing Garden provides a protective space where visitors can immerse themselves in a concentrated collection of planting styles identified throughout the greater Heide grounds.”
The garden’s original layout of paths created by Sunday Reed; a water table at the garden’s centre.
Image: Clytie Meredith
Openwork director Mark Jacques commented: “By increasing diversity, colour, texture, and sensory stimulus, the Healing Garden becomes a space for surrender and escape from the everyday, a place to recharge and step away from normal behaviours. As visitors walk through the garden, we hope they will slow down, hear the birds and leaves swaying in the wind, see the butterflies, smell the flowers and accept the invitation to pause and mindfully explore the detail around them.”
