The Friends’ Plot

NEXT GATHERING: 10-1PM THURS 14TH MAY

CARPARK OFF FOX AVE

The Friends’ Plot is located in the grounds of Wollongong Cemetery, a place of memory and tranquility. It's also a monoculture of lawn with even less canopy than the city's very low canopy average. In the climate crisis of increasing heat and habitat loss, cemeteries hold potential to be places of rememberence while teeming with life. 

Wollongong Council began a trial of native planting on and around graves in plots in the southern section. Our plot sits alongside these plots as a companion, testing full lawn removal and naturalistic planting of Illawarra Lowland Grassy Woodland species. The planting mimics and extends how this critically endangered plant community looks in the bush. In this context the plants are assembled as a garden amongst beautiful headstones under mature Melaleuca trees. With the trees framing a view of sacred Djeera Mt Kiera, it's a beautiful place for gathering, making and reflecting together.

My Research

I’m interested in shifting landscape architecture from designing finished sites for use, toward creating conditions for ongoing collective practices of relation, learning, and care. The Friends’ Plot grows from that curiosity. It’s a living experiment in how small acts of making - like weeding, pruning and planting, can ripple outward into larger cultural and ecological change.

My design influences are diverse — from Clément’s Garden in Motion to the lo-fi politics of European and American landscape practices like Wagon and Terremoto, and the exuberance of the New Perennialists like Piet Oudolf and Nigel Dunnit, to the critical pedagogy of Paulo Friere. Here, in this settler-colonial landscape, “rewilding” is not the right word. This land was never wild. Aboriginal people have cared for these lands and gardened for millennia. So The Friends Plot is not about returning to “nature” but about making with — working responsively and respectfully alongside others - other people, other cultures, other species.

Our first gathering took place with cleansing led by Yuin Jerrinja artist and educator Peter Hewitt who helped the group meet and honour Dharawal Wadi Wadi Country. The work of caring across cultures in respect of First Nations protocols and methodologies will continue season by season, as we learn with the place and with each other.

The Friends’ Plot is a slow, shared inquiry into what landscape architecture can become — beyond control and beyond sustainability - towards listening, reciprocity, and ongoing dialogue with Country.

For me, the project asks: How might spatial design create conditions for inclusive landscape making— for human and more-than-humans, migrant, settler and Indigenous people?

:-) Kathryn Morgan

Insta: kathryn_morgan_gardens

kathryn@understorey.com.au

 In September 2025, the living installation The Grassening was experienced by over 650 people across the two-day Illawarra Nature Festival.  

 Visitors expressed wonder at the beauty of the plants and a strong desire to see species from the Illawarra Lowland Grassy Woodlands return to gardens, schools, and streetscapes across the region. Many described the experience as surprising and delightful, sparking conversations about ecological restoration and the role of art in reimagining futures for endangered landscapes. 

Plants assembled at the Grassening have found homes to flourish at Bundanon Art Museum, the Homeless Hub Depot in Unanderra, Kath and Emma revegetating a verge in Corrimal), Illawarra Aboriginal Corporation including a potting up workshop with Elders facillitated by Narelle Happ of A Garden for Life, and a planting day with kids at Noogaleek preschool, and the trial urban meadow plot in the Wollongong Cemetery which we outline in this page.

With less than 0.5% of this ecological community remaining, The Grassening and its resulting gardens across the Illawara invite people into relationship — to hear, to feel, and to carry the memory, ideas and seeds of the grassland with them across Dharawal Country.