How to create an award-winning garden in a tiny inner-city courtyard

Lest you were in any doubt that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to gardens, one especially compact inner-city space has just taken out a prize in the gardens category of the 2022 National Landscape Architecture Awards.

Weaving in and out, up and over a single-fronted Victorian terrace house, this garden upends any assumptions that some spaces are just too little, too shady or too all-out against-the-odds to be fashioned into a calming oasis of green.

The garden’s designer, landscape architect and horticulturalist Robyn Barlow, says she wanted to create a leafy respite that you could experience as soon as you walked through the house’s front door, which sits mere steps from the footpath.

While house plants might have fitted the bill, Barlow opted for a different route. She planted up a series of outdoor spaces that were integrated into the very architecture of the house.

“Garden rooms” is a much bandied-about term that can refer to even the most loosely compartmentalised of outdoor spaces, but Barlow’s gardens do actually come over as rooms without roofs. It feels no different stepping down to the sunken pond she has fashioned in the middle of the house as it does walking into the kitchen.

This pond courtyard, as well as another courtyard at the back of the house, a roof garden and various garden beds that skirt second-storey windows, were all part of the design by Matt Gibson Architecture & Design, the firm that overhauled this Fitzroy residence in such a way that it became lighter, airier and greener than your typical inner-city terrace.

Barlow describes the finished gardens as a collaborative effort between her, Gibson and Bespoke Landscapes, the outfit charged with constructing them. They are a lesson in the scrutiny it takes to make “tiny gardens with a big impact”, as Barlow puts it.

A “beautiful and multifunctional” way of addressing “small, constrained spaces” is how the judging panel of the awards, run by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and announced this month, described Barlow’s work at this “Fitzroy Bridge House”. The judges said her selection of plants exemplified how an inner-city garden “can enrich people’s lives while giving back to neighbourhood systems”.