What follows, makes so much sense it will become best practice. It’s a problem solver. A budget saver. And it’s such a brilliant way to refresh abused public open spaces, people actually go out of their way to comment on it. Vince Cusumano is currently Senior Coordinator Park, Policy, Trees & Natural Areas for Blacktown [...]
Synergy
From Obsolete Tank to... THIS!
If you look closely you’ll spot a whisper of the original tank wall peeking above the graphics. It hints at the smart design behind this award winning project. Imagine you suddenly found yourself in the new Booran Road Play Space in Melbourne’s City of Glen Eira. Then try to suppose you hadn’t already heard about [...]
WE’RE CELEBRATING
Twenty-five years ago, TerraCottem didn’t exist. Dr Willem Van Cotthem at the University of Ghent was poised to discover TerraCottem’s base model: the fore-runner of a soil conditioner that’s made a success of projects around the world ever since. Back then, Van Cotthem’s team (from the Laboratory of Plant Morphology, Systematics and Ecology) were running [...]
THE MORE YOU KNOW, THE MORE FLOWERS YOU GROW
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you like what you do, then you tend to get better at it. And as the years roll along, the expertise you build up makes your work life more interesting - and the results even better. Here’s a good example, the proof in just one person’s path [...]
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GREENING SINGAPORE EVEN MORE
A few weeks’ back, three of the Australasian TerraCottem team popped over to Singapore for Green UrbanScape Asia, aka GUSA. Given Singapore’s reputation as an astonishing garden city-state, the conference and expo’s theme – intense nature in cities – made perfect sense. Tarrant Baguely and Rick and Tim Sharpe share their observations… Tarrant, better known [...]
SOFT ENGINEERING
The ideal is alive and kicking at the City of Melville. Sitting and working side by side in its local government offices are the City’s civil engineers and landscape architects*. And while this is not new in itself, Melville’s projects are changing form thanks to the two disciplines bouncing ideas off each other. One in [...]
TREEING THE BRUCE
If you find yourself driving down the new section of the Bruce Highway in South East Queensland – the 17 kilometre stretch between the overpass at Traveston and the other overpass near Pomona – you’d be cruising through a seriously chunky revegetation project. We’re talking big areas, some of it planted over the sort of [...]
BIG, WELL-BUILT GREEN SPACES
When the homes are built and the people come to live at Googong, they’ll need spaces like this (under construction, above) to live their lives and create a community. And when these spaces are built well, they look like this (below) in a short space of time… It’s all about space. Leaving enough of it [...]
ON A HILL WITH A VIEW
This retirement community sits on a hill in a blaze of colour surrounded by countless garden spaces – and it's a challenge to maintain given the heat, the sand and the limited rainfall. If you were a seagull sitting on the top of Perth city’s iconic Bell Tower, and you decided to fly almost due [...]
A CYCLONE AND A COMMUNITY
This case-study is a bit of a roller coaster ride. It’s set in the Shire of Livingstone, which stretches midway along the Queensland Coast from Rockhampton in the south to Wild Duck Island to the north – 12,000 square kilometres. The team that manages the Shire’s public open spaces is necessarily large – thirty members [...]
