The Friends’ Plot

Come and join a collaborative garden-making experiment!

The Friends’ Plot is located in the grounds of Wollongong Cemetery, a place of memory and colonial order, but also of monoculture, biodiversity crisis - and the potential for renewal. Nearby, Wollongong Council has begun a test of native planting. Our plot sits alongside it, as both companion and alternative — a modest site for gathering, planting, and learning together.

I’m interested in shifting landscape architecture from designing finished sites for use, toward enabling ongoing practices of relation, learning, and care. The Friends’ Plot grows from that curiosity. It’s a living experiment in how small acts of making 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 Knowledge holder and artist Peter Hewitt who helped the group meet Country attentively and respectfully. 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 art and architecture cultivate pluralistic publics — human and more-than-human, settler and Indigenous — as co-makers of landscape? 

:-) Kathryn

 In Septermber '25, 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.