Texture and temporality: Y3 Garden

Prior to the engagement of Dan Young Landscape Architect (DYLA), the garden of the Y3 House in the Brisbane suburb of St Lucia had suffered from a prolonged period of dry conditions, leaving what little remained of the site a dusty digging ground for the client’s two energetic Scottish terriers. The poor quality of the garden’s existing soil necessitated its wholesale removal, giving DYLA the opportunity to develop a new vision for the space. The Y3 Garden rises within the courtyard of an architecturally striking house designed two decades ago by Brisbane-based practice Donovan Hill.

From the front gate, the garden forms the right side of a narrow passage, with the dwelling’s sitting room and kitchen opening to the left and a cosy outdoor seating area that opposes the garden at the courtyard’s rear. While the garden remains predominantly open to the sky, the feeling of compression created by the dwelling’s pronounced verticality and overhanging roof contrasts with the breadth and openness of the street, heightening the transition from the public realm to the finer-grained and introspective realm of the private. This transition is mediated by the high skeletal scaffolding of the dwelling’s front gate and fence, through which – while the planting is still young – one can catch glimpses of passers-by from within, and, occasionally, of domestic life from the street.

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DYLA’s design reinforces the garden as an introspective space for domestic inhabitation.

Image: Andy Macpherson

The garden animates a large plinth in the central courtyard, with strong visual connections to the sitting room, the kitchen and the exterior seating area at the courtyard’s rear. Adjoining the kitchen, the remainder of the three-storey dwelling extends as a series of rooms built over the sloping terrain that falls downward toward the back of the house. Adding to the ground-level visual and spatial connections, a generous balcony runs the length of the building’s upper storey, affording views over the garden and courtyard area.

A collection of pot plants accumulated by the clients over many years provided DYLA with a textural and chromatic starting point for the design, with these markers now acting as a transition between the garden and the surrounding decking. A small-leafed lily pily near the house’s front gate, which has now grown through its pot, was inherited from the garden’s previous planting and acts as a playful memento.

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Prostrate rosemary, native violet and westringia form a tangle of textures in a garden corner.

Image: Andy Macpherson

The dynamism of the garden contrasts with the warm yet austere materiality of the house, its surfaces and geometry. In place of the lawn and singlar tree typical of many urban residential courtyards, DYLA has positioned small groupings of Betula nigra (tropical birches) at the corners of the space. The birches’ shimmering foliage screens the exterior seating area from views through the front gate and fosters a sense of gentle enclosure, while their slender trunks and repetitive branching patterns echo the dwelling’s exposed timber striations, honouring and augmenting the garden’s architectural frame. I imagine that during the summer months, the rain will intensify the garden’s verdant tones and the hues of wet wood, coaxed warmer and redder by each intermittent shower.

A major design driver was to draw the house’s inhabitants up the stairs and into the garden – to emphasise the garden as experience, rather than simply an object for viewing. Stepping up onto the plinth, the sensory qualities of the plantings become apparent and the visual gives way to a cacophony of the haptic. On the radiant April afternoon when I visited, the garden was lively and intoxicating. Dichondra repens (kidney weed) roamed adventurously over the edges of the garden’s concrete plinth, while tousled clumpings of Dianella caerulea (blue flax-lily) and Ophiopogon japonicus (mondo grass) quivered momentarily in the faint breeze. From the outdoor lounge that overlooks the garden, the light appeared dappled and filtered; however, ensconced within the plantings, the cool recesses of the house melted away to the warmth and brilliance of sunlight on bare skin and the papery chorus of the wind through the birches.

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A view onto the garden from the courtyard’s rear seating area; birches stretch skyward and dichondra and native violet spill over the plinth’s edge.

Image: Andy Macpherson

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The sitting room looks out into the garden; steps draw the house’s inhabitants up into the space.

Image: Andy Macpherson

Contrasting with the broad-leaved vegetation of the surrounding suburb, DYLA’s design nurtures the garden as an intimate space for domestic inhabitation. Micro-leaved Viola hederacea (native violet) colonizes the space between mottled gneiss pavers with Dichondra argentea (silver falls dichondra) and Rosmarinus officinalis ‘Prostratus’ (prostrate rosemary) extending a tangle of textures that invite closer visual and tactile inspection. Grasses and leaves shiver in the breeze, rosemary and violet orchestrate a slow entanglement. As the sun climbs over the curve of the day, foliage and tree limbs cast shifting patterns onto the building’s timber frame.

While seasonality in Brisbane isn’t so pronounced, with the city experiencing a relatively even year-round subtropical climate, it nonetheless informed DYLA’s choices. The birches, a muted pewter and green in autumn, will shed their leaves, allowing solar access to the house during the mild winter months; and during the wetter summer months, the violet will dominate, to be overtaken by dichondra once again when the dry season returns. The city’s propensity for generous rainfall and abundant sunshine suggests that in a year’s time, the pandorea scaling the front fence will have spread its sprawling tendrils, offering additional privacy for the garden’s inhabitants, and the grasses will have grown up and out, adding bulk to the mid-storey. Near the courtyard’s north-eastern edge, in a nod to the use of bamboo-as-screening in many of the architect’s other projects, DYLA has planted a line of Gigantochloa sp. ‘Hitam Hijau’ (bamboo Hitam Hijau), which will soon filter neighbouring views.

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Grasses, groundcovers and trees create a layered microcosm of textures with a muted palette of grey and green.

Image: Andy Macpherson

As garden and building continue to age and settle into one other in an evolving performance of silver and green, the client’s delight in the transformation from dry and bare ground to lush and layered landscape is clear. Gardens are some of the first places where we learn to discern changes in the natural world and cultivate an attentiveness to the rhythms and cycles of living things. At Y3 Garden, between the choreographed and the unpredictable, this narrative is just beginning.

Plant list

Alpinia nutans (dwarf cardamom), Baeckea virgata ‘Dwarf’ (dwarf heath myrtle), Betula nigra (tropical birch), Chonemorpha fragrans (climbing frangipani), Dianella caerulea (blue flax-lily), Dichondra argentea (silver falls), Dichondra repens (kidney weed), Gigantochloa sp. ‘Hitam Hijau’ (bamboo Hitam Hijau), Juniperus procumbens ‘Nana’ (Japanese garden juniper), Lomandra confertifolia ‘Little Con’ (Lomandra ‘Little Con’), Myoporum ellipticum (coastal boobialla), Ophiopogon japonicus (mondo grass), Rosmarinus officinalis ‘Procumbens’ (prostrate rosemary), Tecomanthe hillii (Fraser Island creeper), Thunbergia mysorensis (lady slipper vine), Viola hederacea (native violet), Westringia fruticosa ‘Flat’n’Fruity’ (Westringia Flat ‘n’ Fruity), Westringia fruticosa ‘Smokey’ (Westringia Smokie), Zoysia tenuifolia (Korean velvet grass)