Alchemy Garden is a site specific community garden of edible and medicinal native and non-native plants at the National Art School (NAS), Darlinghurst, created for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, NIRIN, 2020. It is tended by local community group the Darlo Darlings who maintain it as an urban food garden and learning hub for environmental awareness for deeper ecological engagement.
Form follows function with this self-watering garden based on ancient wicking bed technology. The angle of the site informs the garden design and shape, determining which plants can grow where and moisture flow creates the resulting soil micro-climates. Since September 2019, the Darlo’s and I have nurtured the soil, turning a commercial landscaping mixture into fertile bioactive soil to support a broad spectrum of drought tolerant natives and temperate non-native flora. We inoculated it with Bokashi compost from fermented domestic food waste, and mycelium rich native leaf compost collected from the grounds of the Powerhouse Museum’s Castle Hill warehouse. The garden is covered with a layer of Cypress Pine mulch from Randwick Community Nursery where many of the plants were bought (cypress mulch is a byproduct of native deforestation and this topic will be part of the conversation on sustainable practices).
Water is our most precious resource, but also a major problem in Australia with the inevitable floods that follow drought. The Alchemy Garden design addresses this with inbuilt water saving as well as water drainage practices. Wastewater is collected from the NAS cafe coffee machine, along with clay slurry water from the school’s Ceramic department and enters a subterranean reservoir via the yellow charcoal filter. Water is also filtered into a galvanised iron water tank which supplies the wick-bed planter boxes and is used for surface watering of seedlings until their roots reach the underground water. Bacteria and minerals filtered from the waste water makes the charcoal bioactive. On a monthly rotation this charcoal is dug into the garden as fertiliser and the filter is replenished with new charcoal. The Charcoal is Biochar, a product that replicates ancient waste management to create fertiliser through a process of low temperature burning with minimal access to oxygen. Such practices have been used by indigenous cultures around the world for thousands of years.
Alchemy Garden was to be the platform for a series of workshop events throughout the Biennale. For each event I partnered with specialists in their own field to highlight sustainable food production practices. Unfortunately, due to Covid-19 restrictions these events will be presented online and accessible through the Biennale website.
The workshops will consider sustainable food growing practices that offer ways to see and understand our past and future impact on global ecological systems. This project is significantly informed by Indigenous Australian agricultural and cultural practices that created fertile anthropogenic soils across the continent through processes such as fire stick farming. The Alchemy Garden workshops will demonstrate alternative agriculture practices in an urban community context, highlighting everyday processes that contribute to mitigation of the climate crisis.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more updates.
Andrew Rewald
