Big Dreams for Wales Street

While the architecture students worked on their more grand masterplans for the whole school, and the kids were sprouting seeds and doing drawings, I started playing with designs for a climbing bean garden. Below are some photos taken while working on it – so they are not showing a finished idea, but one still in progress.

The garden aims to bring all the kid’s sprouts together in creating a new garden area that the kids have contributed to through the sprouting of seeds. Climbing bean gardens are often done in the form of tee-pee or maypole structures. This design tries to make the beans, and their garden bed, talk a little more than usual, like those in this excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’, where Alice is talking to a grumpy Tiger-lily:

‘How is it you can all talk so nicely?’ Alice said, hoping to get it into a better temper by a compliment. ‘I’ve been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.’
‘Put your hand down, and feel the ground,’ said the Tiger-lily. ‘Then you’ll know why.’
Alice did so. ‘It’s very hard,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see what that has to do with it.’
‘In most gardens,’ the Tiger-lily said, ‘they make the beds too soft — so that the flowers are always asleep.’

This garden bed aims to be somewhere between hard and soft, or plastic: soft enough to respond to an influence, but hard enough not to fall apart in doing so. It also tried to achieve a composition that is somewhere between the garden bed (where plants gather) and the flower pot (where plants are isolated from others), or a communal space akin to somewhere between the share house and the individual dwelling. This very plastic garden plays somewhat with the artificiality of nature (especially of gardens), and the link between the artificial and the imagined. Hopefully this provides something akin to a fairy garden, or something with enough ‘flutter and glitter’ for it to appeal to children’s love of magic things.

The garden is developing slowly over time. Updates are being posted in the blog post section of this site.

Pia Ednie-Brown
senior lecturer
school of architecture and design
rmit university.
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director | onomatopoeia
a creative research practice.