A nature driven inner city terrace renovation | Garden Design and Inspiration | Gardening Australia

Clarence visits an inner-city terrace house, renovated by a landscape architect with a focus on maximising green space for both his family and biodiversity. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Redfern is a small, yet densely populated suburb of inner-Sydney with a diverse history of changing land use. In a narrow 3 story block right off the bustling Cleveland St hub, Landscape Architect Sacha Coles has transformed his own shady courtyard and concrete rooftop into a lush oasis to maximise his family’s access to nature, along with being a vital food forest for pollinators.

As soon as you walk in the front door, your view is directed to the tropical plants of the ground floor courtyard and the trunks of three tall Livistona australis. As you head upstairs, circular skylights capture each palm canopy, so you still feel like you’re under the trees. And even further up, the canopies pop out above a flat rooftop garden that has been covered in a variety of natives and cottage perennials to form a low, lush mass of varying leaf forms, colours, and flowers.

“We’d been living here for 15 years and got to the point of deciding ‘do we move or not?’ It’s a 2-bed terrace, not a lot of room for the kids. But we love the community and it’s a great spot, so decided to bite the bullet, renovate, and given my expertise and passion, it started with the idea it should be redesigned around a green roof and that wherever you are in the house, you’re looking out to see views of greenery. Sacha’s passion for incorporating biophilic design principles (having close access to greenery, natural light and materials, and a design that draws on the feelings you get in nature) was a big influence on the space as it helped overcome those challenges of being in a packed urban and concrete environment, making the space feel calm, connected and with lots of points of interest.

The ground level courtyard (around 4x4m) is a tranquil atrium space. It has no northern light, so it’s become a tropical pocket, like a gully. For a small space, Sacha put in a lot of big plants to make it feel established quickly and form a relaxing place to sit outside or watch from the living room. There are elephant ears (Colocasia), gingers (Alpinia caerulea), Australian Fan Palm (Licuala ramsayi) and ferns, with smaller scramblers and grasses to fill in the gaps (dichondra, liriope, native violets) and large elkhorns hanging off the wall.

Heading up to the top, “it’s a dense environment, with as much useful planting as possible surrounding the top of the skylights that look almost like ponds. The brief was a pollination garden to help the littlest of us survive” and with its beautiful, rambling species, it’s rich and diverse. It was not so much about the family using it or having a garden that needed pruning and maintenance – it’s a wild garden. “We’re surrounded by parks so the last thing I wanted to do was replicate that.”

Creating a green roof does take some planning and it’s a big initial investment. Underneath the plants and pebbles is a layered drainage system of jute matting, structural soil cells, and “engineered soil – specified for a roof top.” Sacha sees the rooftop garden as an investment in the future and in wellbeing. “Rather than the standard corrugated roof that does nothing, our roof basically is a temperature ballast – in summer it keeps us cool and in winter the heat stays in – it’s a thermal mass.”

Bringing green spaces to the forefront of any design doesn’t have to be hard. As Sacha points out, “If people understand that there are products off the shelves they can use, it’s not that scary… and it’s what we should all be doing. Solar panels have been taken up everywhere and this idea of utilising roof space is just another thing we can do.”

Featured Plants:
CABBAGE-TREE PALM – Livistona australis
ELEPHANT EARS – Colocasia esculenta ‘Black Magic’
PEACE LILY – Spathiphyllum wallisii cv.
ELKHORN – Platycerium bifurcatum
PURPLE-LEAFED PLECTRANTHUS – Plectranthus ciliatus
Plectranthus cv.
PURPLE CORAL PEA – Hardenbergia violacea
KNOBBY CLUB-RUSH – Ficinia nodosa

Filmed on Dharug Country | Auburn, NSW
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