Hannah visits a tiny yard in Melbourne’s inner-city that is bursting with ideas and productive plants. Subscribe 🔔 [ Ссылка ]
Hannah's in Melbourne to visit an inner-city patch that's small on space but big on plants and style. Garden owners, Judy and Andreas Sederof, have transformed a challenging block into a productive patch that is filled with color year-round. Situated in Brunswick east near the Merri Creek, it's filled to the brim with plants and ideas in every inch of this 66sqm garden. Judy describes it as “pretty eclectic, pretty crazy... I just collect plants. I'll see a plant and I’ll love it.” The site has been designed with the house built on the back boundary to leave a bigger space for a garden out the front. The diversity of the garden highlights different types of plants, which take advantage of the various soil profiles. Judy says, “we have quite deep, productive soil here which was nurtured, adding compost and mulch, but it really was pretty good to begin with. Whereas this side of the garden is really all on rock, so it had to be built above the ground.” There’s a lot of colour in this garden and Judy says this is due to her background in design and interiors, “I just love color and I'm always changing the color pallets and getting it to work together.”

Judy and Andreas have been designing sustainable houses for 30 years and built their own with the aim of being light on the land. Andreas says, “the four critical elements are glass, mass, insulation and most importantly orientation. We chose this block because the house faces north which is the optimum angle for sustainable building design, often called passive design.” In this home, the ceiling has 2-feet of insulation which Andreas calls “super-insulation” as it’s double the standardised requirements. “Everything in here is double or triple glazed... and to get this house to 9.5 stars, we had to provide way more concrete or brickwork than this house was planned for,” says Andreas. The sustainable principles that underpin the house can also be found in the garden. Timber used in the wicking beds is Cypress macrocarpa, which is known to be a sustainable timber, and “things like not having any hard surfaces so that the land absorbs the moisture, and it doesn't heat up the building,” says Judy. Pipes direct grey water from the shower to the garden, as well as “two squat rainwater tanks underneath the deck here that are connected to a pump; they collect rainwater from the roof. We use that a lot in summer,” says Judy.

With no bare ground in the planting style, Judy says, “one of the things is to plant heavily so it keeps weeds down. They also provide quite a lot more moisture to the site, so I mulch, but I don't have to weed very often.” Much of the garden is edible, including flowers like nasturtium, marigold and viola. Judy says, “In summer I can grow some of the bigger vegies like eggplants and tomatoes. Over winter, there's more low growing brassicas and herbs.” Judy utilises tent structures and shed walls to grow vegies vertically, as well as wicking beds that were built by Andreas. “They're really high functioning wicking beds,” says Judy, “They store a lot of the moisture, and it wicks up in the soil. I just have to put a light sprinkling of water on top when I'm growing seeds but mostly the vegetables root down quite well.” Judy takes her love of designing interiors to the outdoors and uses a lot of recycled materials, including baskets from old vineyards repurposed as planters, and an eclectic mix of mirrors, sculptures and ornaments found in hard rubbish collections. “I do collect things... I do it innately, I don't think about it that much,” says Judy and in a cool temperate garden when many plants lose their leaves, having these elements really hold the garden together. Even though it's a small space, there's more than enough happening year-round to keep Judy actively planting, improving and making the most of her little productive inner-city sanctuary. “It's a connection with the Earth to me,” says Judy, “it really grounds me... it's very soothing.”
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