St Kilda Botanical Gardens Directions Plan

The future directions plan is not a master plan – which would demand a multidiscipline project team, extensive community consultation, and be more comprehensive and prescriptive in its outcomes. The value of the future directions plan is its flexibility and its bridge between planning and design. It aims to reconnect the past to the present by actions which will re-establish coherence and contemporary relevance. Our approach has been to carefully examine all remnants of nearly 150 years of growth and decline and redevelopment, and ask ‘what can be made of this place now?’ The knowledge that these gardens were carefully planned and designed brings a responsibility to respect ‘original design intent’ as can be rediscovered from fragments of historical evidence. Inevitably there are gaps in the evidence, which leaves place for reformatting the ‘traces’ as a connected whole and for new interventions to be imagined. The basis of the Botanic Gardens is the plant collection. The four roles of the botanic garden are scientific, conservation, education and recreation, which depend on the plant collections, other than the recreation component.