The City Gardener by Richard Unsworth
Richard Unsworth is the essence of a ‘City Gardener’. The owner of outdoor design store Garden Life in Sydney, Unsworth is also a garden designer and writer specialising in inner urban spaces. He puts these skills to good use in his second book, The City Gardener, which features 20 contemporary urban gardens designed and constructed by Unsworth and his team in the Harbour city.
Unsworth aims to inspire current and future urban gardeners to connect with outdoor spaces around them. This is a worthy sentiment, given that the number of people living in urban settlements is predicted to increase. More than two out of three people are likely to be living in cities or other urban centres by 20501. While COVID-19 is projected to slow population growth across all geographic areas, the population of our major Australian cities is still set to increase. Melbourne is projected to overtake Sydney to become Australia’s largest city in 2026–27, with a population of 6.2 million by 2030–31, compared to 6.0 million in Sydney2. However, garden spaces are shrinking with design professionals lamenting the loss of private gardens across Australia as bigger and bigger dwellings diminish the size of backyards across the country3.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the value of private outdoor space especially in cities. The City Gardener is therefore a timely release as we adjust to the so-called ‘new normal’ and seek to create our own urban retreats. However, designing these small spaces can be challenging, as Unsworth acknowledges:
I believe there is more of a challenge in designing urban gardens than there is when working with their larger suburban cousins. In more expansive spaces, there exists room for nature’s unpredictability. There, an underperforming shrub or tree might not be so noticeable, but in a tighter space, everything is on show. Our city gardens don’t leave much room for error, and every element needs to work hard, be ‘on point’ and grab our attention.
In The City Gardener, Unsworth shares details of 20 of his city garden projects to inspire fellow designers. Nicholas Watt beautifully illustrates each project with his photography. Unsworth provides an overview of each project, beginning with the project brief and including each garden’s total size, sun exposure, orientation, distance from the CBD and garden maintenance level per quarter (hours). A basic plan illustrates the design vision, and a budget breakdown shows percentage of the project spend on plants, construction, furniture and pots, and lighting. Unsworth also shares his plant list for each garden. Each plant listed is then catalogued in a Plant Index at the end of the book, where its preferred climate, light tolerance (sunlight) , drought tolerance and maintenance guide are outlined.
The City Gardener contains a chapter dedicated to the design principles behind Unsworth’s gardens, namely scale, repetition, balance and harmony. Acknowledging the need to use all surfaces in a small space, Unsworth includes advice for greening walls in a brief section on vertical gardens. He also shares his tips for creating privacy and intimacy, a very important feature of gardens in our increasingly dense cities. Unsworth does not forget the non-living elements of his gardens, providing information on garden structure and hardscape, and finishing touches such as furniture and pots.
While the design principles may be transferrable to any city setting, the plant selection may not be. The plants that Unsworth selects are obviously suited to Sydney’s warm temperate climate and the unique micro-climates in each of his clients’ properties. Most of the plants listed in the Plant Index are suited to temperate, subtropical and/or tropical climates, although there are a few suitable in cool temperate climes.
Although The City Gardener obviously targets designers of gardens in urban areas, those fortunate enough to live and work in rural or regional parts of Australia can take something away from this book too. For example, consider each of Unsworth’s garden designs as an ‘outside room’ in a larger garden setting. I highly recommend The City Gardener to garden and landscape designers across the country.
Gabrielle Stannus, Inwardout Studio
References
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The City Gardener: Contemporary urban gardener is available online or at all good retailers.
RRP $49.99. Hardback. 256 pages. Available 28 September 2021. ISBN 9781760761301. Thames & Hudson Australia Pty Ltd.
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