AKAS Landscape Architecture and Nrth Landscapes have collaborated on a show garden for the 2022 edition of the annual Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show held in Carlton Gardens. Titled Coming Soon, the installation explores the effects of climate change on the Melbourne suburbs.
“The concept is about what’s going to happen if we don’t act immediately on the climate urgency,” said AKAS co-director Alistair Kirkpatrick. “What is coming soon for us is a post-anthropocentric world where there’s no longer much suitable habitat for homosapiens.”
Designed by AKAS and constructed by Nrth, the installation is a distinct departure from the more conventional gardens on show. Visitors to the installation are confronted with a decaying weatherboard house sinking haphazardly into a pond of water and a heap of bluestone rubble, while a prominent pink neon sign displays the quantity: “2.6 billion square metres” at the garden’s front. The number refers to the global rate of deforestation – 2.6 billion square metres over the five-day period that the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show takes place, or approximately a football field of forest every second.
The installation depicts the house – sinking as a result of sea-level rise – as a refuge for vegetation.
Image: courtesy Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show
“We wanted to build an average suburban house in inner-north Melbourne that has collapsed and is sinking into the earth and the water, with the local Melbourne geology pushing up around it,” said Kirkpatrick. “When we were thinking about the concept and the changes that climate change will bring, we thought, well, what novel ecology might take over in that scenario?”
No longer a habitat for humans, the installation explores the remnants of the suburban house as a refuge for vegetation which has taken over the decaying architecture to generate a hybrid landscape. AKAS have deployed a mixture of native and exotic species and common house plants, including Lomandra longifolia (mat rush), Ajuga reptan (carpet bugle) and viola hederacea (native violet) that speculates on the new ecology that might evolve in the suburbs in a future without human intervention.
“If we want to actually be able to be here for our children, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren then we have to go beyond tokenism and beyond sustainability as a marketing tool and start making some radical changes now,” Kirkpatrick said. “We wanted the garden to trigger more of these conversations.”
In keeping with the studio’s focus on sustainbility, the garden was constructed predominantly using recycled, salvaged, found and borrowed materials.
Coming Soon was on exhibition at the 2022 Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show at Carlton Gardens from 30 March to 3 April.
