Arid Garden

Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Victoria
Interpetation design

Client: Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria
Concept, writing and project coordination: Fiona Rice
Design: Alex Miles
Landscape Architect: Andrew Laidlaw

Set within the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens, The Arid Garden is a place for discovering the wonders of cacti and succulents. It features the extraordinary collection of father and son, Ralph and Robert Field, who bequeathed their cacti and succulents to RBGV. The playful storytelling draws upon Ralph’s story of childhood curiosity and themes of collecting and care, while visual inspiration comes from vintage plant labels and his notebook excerpts. Throughout the garden, short stories printed to seat surfaces and inserted into garden beds reveal the wonders of cacti and succulents, exploring topics such as climate change, invasive species, adaptation and resilience. Sculptural cacti sit amongst real plants allowing visitors to safely explore the features of cacti, while young botanists can take their own Field Notes and rubbings of the unique patterns of succulents, inset into the concrete as steel shapes, inspiring a new generation of collectors and conservationists.