—by Peter Barrett
From New York’s High Line to London’s Olympic Park, cultural gardens have become magnetic destinations in their own right. Now Melbourne is joining the movement, with a bold reimagining of what urban green space can achieve.
Main image: Native plantings at Laak Boorndap’s Test Garden reflect the biodiversity principles driving the ambitious civic project. Image: Sarah Pannell.
On the edge of Federation Square’s sprawling carpark, an office worker is perched on the roundabout with her Tupperware lunch. It’s a relatively quiet place, save for the intermittent school bus dropping off or picking up. The view is pretty ordinary—asphalt, cars, infrastructure—not a place you’d ordinarily choose to linger with the Yarra River so close. But that was before the Test Garden arrived.
Today, lunch looks different. Canary yellow Cats Tails (Bulbine bulbosa) bob in the breeze as bees fuss about from one vivid purple South American Cistanthe grandiflora flower to another. Clumps of flowering violet Chocolate Lilies (Arthropodium strictum) jostle for room with autumnal hued succulents, while native Kangaroo grasses burst forth among the choreographed chaos, their long stems heavy with shaggy, star-shaped seed heads.
Welcome to the Laak Boorndap Test Garden. Designed by design firm Hassell in collaboration with leading UK horticulturalists James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett, alongside Australian plant expert Jac Semmler of Super Bloom, this tiny prototype planting is set to be scaled up to cover 18,000sqm—about the size of the MCG—wrapping around the forthcoming Melbourne Arts Precinct, which will connect 50 venues including Hamer Hall, a refurbished Arts Centre, NGV International and brand new The Fox: NGV Contemporary. The total cost of the Victorian Government’s Melbourne Arts Transformation project investment is $1.7bn.
But Laak Boorndap—named by Traditional Owner and Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Aunty Gail Smith—will be more than just a pleasant lunch spot. When it opens in 2029, it will be the most ambitious example yet of a global green movement. From the High Line in New York and London’s Southbank Centre, to Hong Kong’s M+ West Kowloon District, gardens are becoming central to how leading cultural institutions engage with communities, promote ecology and foster cultural connection.
Katrina Sedgwick, director and CEO of MAP Co, the authority responsible for delivering the project, says data worldwide shows gardens attract visitors. Botanical gardens and parks have done so for centuries, but what’s new is how contemporary interventions in dense urban spaces are proving transformative. They don’t just boost wellbeing for locals—they’ve become destinations in their own right. “They are, in and of themselves, hugely popular,” Sedgwick says, with visitor estimates for Laak Boorndap exceeding 4.5 million per year.
The key here is design. Forget your clipped lawns, cropped hedges and token rose beds. Picture instead complex, biodiverse ecologies of riotous colour that bloom year-round, changing not only with the seasons, but month to month.
That was the pitch from University of Sheffield horticulturalists James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett for Melbourne’s Laak Boorndap. The pair rose to fame when their 2004 book The Dynamic Landscape: Design, Ecology, and Management of Naturalistic Urban Planting won them the job reimagining Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London—10ha of former industrial land transformed into a living, flowering spectacle of vast, biodiverse meadows. Olympic audiences were dazzled. A new benchmark for urban ecological design was set.
Hitchmough, who lives in Somerset, England, has strong Australian roots. He spent a decade here in the 1980s teaching horticulture at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley Campus (his students included Paul Bangay). During this period, he became a passionate advocate for Victoria’s endangered Western Plains grasslands. Today he remains a dual Australian-British citizen. For more than 30 years he has worked with fellow Sheffield professor Nigel Dunnett, promoting a philosophy that Hitchmough describes as the fusion of “ecological science, design and people’s cultural responses to vegetation.”
In other words, they’re chasing the “wow factor”. Dunnett and Hitchmough want visitors to feel something. They know that not everyone will approve—their plantings mix local, endemic, native, and (gulp) exotic species—but behind it lies a pragmatic truth: the climate is changing and if we want to preserve biodiversity, especially in cities, we need to think differently.
It’s also about seeing urban vegetation differently. “Rather than filling space, like a green antidote to concrete, it’s seeing this stuff as actually having a role in terms of human wellbeing,” says Hitchmough. “So, you invest more in it, because people who are interested in gardens, they live longer,” he enthuses.
Laak Boorndap will feature a mix of 450 different species, all tested by University of Melbourne researchers for drought and climate resilience over three years. (Some climate models suggest Melbourne could feel more like Dubbo by the end of the century.) The designers hope these gardens will inspire people to adopt this planting ideology at home or in public places to support biodiversity.
Maintenance will be the ultimate test. Gardens need gardeners. In Britain, Hitchmough notes, biodiversity credits—similar to carbon trading schemes—can fund urban horticulture. Australia legislated a biodiversity market in 2023 but it remains voluntary. “All gardens are really processes, not products,” he contends. “The nature of most gardens, both historical and the sort of weird, wacky stuff that we make, is all about change. It’s about trying to manage change in ways that are still acceptable but accepting that change must take place.”
Back in Melbourne, lead project consultant and Australian design practice Hassell is working with New York architects SO-IL, specialists in cultural buildings, towards a vision of a garden that can be thoroughfare, picnic spot, performance space and sculpture park, all rolled into one.
Principal architect Jon Hazelwood was keen not to replicate New York’s High Line, but to embed zones inspired by Victoria’s volcanic grasslands and the Dandenong Ranges.
And, if the Test Garden at Federation Square is anything to go by, things look promising. “That has taken everybody by surprise,” Hazelwood observes. “We’ve been overawed by how popular a small area of planting that is a sixtieth the size of the final project has been.” Work is also being undertaken to ensure non-humans are also welcomed to the site, including critters like the native blue-banded bee and local honeyeaters.
Sedgwick is equally confident. She believes Laak Boorndap will be a destination for tourists, a retreat for workers and students, and a civic space that supports wider efforts to adapt the city to a changing climate. “It’s going to be absolutely beautiful.”