What I love about our Gardening Australia community
is your ingenuity and constant surprises.
Take this part of Surry Hills, in inner Sydney.
There's the hustle and bustle of busy roads,
noisy, numerous shops and restaurants,
and former industrial buildings like this 1940s tractor factory.
But even here there's a beautifully designed, green and tranquil oasis
to be found.
Let me take you to a garden in the sky.
Hi, Adam. How you going? Good. How are you?
Nice to meet you. Great to be here.
Come through. I can't wait to look around.
Yeah!
Adam is an architect and designed this incredible living space.
He's also very keen on his garden.
And living five storeys closer to the clouds didn't stop him.
Adam, as an architect,
you've designed all sorts of buildings
in landscapes with gardens and so on.
Why did you choose your place to be five levels up in the sky?
We had a house with a garden
and we got broken into about four times in a row,
and my husband was like,
"We're gonna move to an apartment. We're gonna go upstairs.
"I don't want to get broken into again."
But I love gardens, so it was kind of this stand-off between the two.
Mike was like, "I don't want to live at ground level,"
and I was like, "Well, I want a garden."
It was like, "What do we do?"
We design a lot of apartment buildings,
so this was a bit of a test case to say,
"Can we change the way apartments are thought about,
"and make them much more like a home,
"and in that process get a garden in it?"
So, the garden's 350 square metres,
so it's quite a big garden.
The house is 190 square metres.
How exactly does the layout work here across the two levels?
So, this level is the living level and the garden...
..what the garden does here is a lot about layering,
so you've got the living space,
you've got the garden as the middle ground,
and then you get the views as the long distance.
Sort of through it. Yeah, yeah.
And the garden helps cut out roofs and ugly mess of the city.
Upstairs is much more free.
It's much more organic, it's much more wild.
I want to feel like I'm in the bush.
I want the trees, I want the birds, I want the, kind of, animals.
So, the idea was could we make the garden
bigger than the house, in a way?
I think one thing people get wrong when designing buildings
is they make a lot of building and not much garden,
and I kind of think, "Well, actually let's do the exact opposite.
"Let's make more garden and less building."
This apartment is on top of another building.
The building below was designed
to have tractors drive around on the top of it,
so we were able to put, you know,
close to a metre of soil on top of the building
without having to boost the structure below.
Then with the trees, we just had to make sure
the trees were located on top of columns
so that the kind of load of that
would transfer down through the building.
It was a little bit technical
but actually in the end it was quite easy
'cause someone had done a lot of the heavy lifting for us beforehand.
The brief was it should feel like the bush.
Native gardens, I don't want pots.
Everything has to be in soil.
And grass so the dog, Eric,
can run around and enjoy it.
I wanted to feel like we're at ground,
so everything had to be flush,
so we raised the floor level of the apartment
so that we could lower the depth of the soil for the garden.
Let's make a garden like you've never seen before,
but make it in a way that it has a lushness to it
which is distinctly Sydney.
Landscape architect Tom Smith
brought Adam's vision to life,
creating a unique sky-high garden.
Costa, how are you? Tom, good to meet you.
Yeah, likewise.
Now, the rain here's a little bit problematic for us filming,
but what about the challenges for you
in building a garden right up here in the sky?
Yeah, so, the big thing for us was obviously making sure
we select the right plants to deal with these conditions.
Obviously a lot of wind, a lot of wind,
and a lot of sun exposure as well.
But the main thing for us, to be honest,
was soil depth and the drainage.
Soil depth and drainage are such a key to any garden's success.
How did you achieve it up here?
Yeah, so we did a lot of collective work
with the builder and the architect
to make sure we had effective drainage,
and that went right back to the waterproofing
and drainage cell layers.
So, we had to get that right.
Where we've got trees in the lower part of the garden,
we've got up to 700 of soil,
but up here we've got 400,
so it's amazing to see how much these have grown
in that little amount of soil.
We chose the banksia and the leptospermum
primarily because they grow quite quickly
and they also suit low-soil conditions,
so you see them growing up and down the coastline
in sandstone outcrops.
They're quite tough and hardy.
So, what sort of effects were you trying to achieve?
So, the main thing up here particularly
was to create a layering effect
and really lose yourself within a garden.
So, a lot of these plants
were strategically specified for that reason.
We wanted to create that looseness and untamed nature
just to make you feel like you're,
you know, in a bushland, essentially.
I love the fact that the grasses
do sort of lean over the actual grass,
so you don't know where one ends and the other begins.
No, you've lost the geometry of the lawn edge, which is quite nice.
I mean, that's one of the beautiful things about the garden,
is its looseness.
How did you kind of work from the canopy down?
Yeah, so, the secondary layer's quite important.
So, you'll see throughout the garden
we've got a combination of grasses that we've massed,
like lomandra and the Imperata cylindrica.
In terms of the ground covers,
we had some pennisetum, the fountain grass,
some ground cover as well, such as cissus.
So you get that nice interchangeability
between the colours of the understory
and the upper tree level as well.
We've gone from being up in the canopy
to down here in the... in the garden now.
Yeah.
And there's a lot more to this narrow strip
than really meets the eye, isn't there?
Yeah, it plays a really important role.
The temptation here would be to maximise the floor space
in terms of the hardscape material,
whether it be furniture and pots or what have you.
So, giving this area back to make it as lush and green as possible
is really beneficial for the internal rooms visually,
looking out.
And you've got your table there.
Why have another outdoor table
when you're actually bringing the outdoors in
and replicating this pavement so it feels like it's part of it?
Yeah, exactly.
What's the story behind the planting in this corner?
So, the paperbarks play an important role
in terms of providing scale,
and also strategic screening to some surrounding buildings.
And then we've got these massed plants of Lomandra 'Katrinus',
which do a really important role
in providing that green lushness from the internal rooms as well.
And, I mean, they cover the rail perfectly
from inside looking out.
The cordylines are giving a nice feel here.
Yeah, so, they're the main accent plant down on this level.
And it's amazing how tall they've grown,
because they went in, obviously, at this height
and now they've developed really beautiful sculptural trunks,
which is really quite beautiful.
The cordylines create such a striking visual element,
but something tells me they'd be best viewed from in there...
Yeah. ..looking up.
It's not every day you see an outdoor bath,
particularly in an environment like this,
so it's quite a beautiful little nook of the garden.
What are you most proud of in this job?
Yeah, I guess we're, as a team, we're really proud
of, I guess, the success of all the planting.
You feel like you're in an Australian bushland
and you don't always get that on a rooftop.
Adam, what's the garden mean to you on a day-to-day basis?
Look, on a day-to-day basis, it's joy.
Tom nailed it in the sense that you do feel like you're in the bush.
The garden transports you to another place.
So you can have the activity of the city when you go downstairs,
and then as soon as you come up,
there's this serenity and quietness that the garden gives.
This is luxury, I think.
We're very, very lucky.