Past Programs
Gardening and Landscape - 2008
Trends: urban forests
24/12/2008
This week Trends and Products is about urban forests, with physicist Dr Peter Fisher, who emailed us in response to our Conversation in June with the Melbourne City Council's Rob Adams. Dr Fisher has a passion for old-fashioned shade from trees and plants, and is lobbying hard for urban forests. He is a climate change consultant and research fellow at the Central Queensland University.
Part of the By Design Summer Seaon this was first aired August 2, 2008
Trends: Greening abandoned industrial sites
23/08/2008
This week in our regular Trends segment where we look at developments in a particular part of the designed world, we're focusing on the greening of abandoned industrial spaces.
For some years now across the world urban planners and landscape architects have increasingly pushed the boundaries in transforming industrial wastelands—and often contaminated ground—into parkland.
Areas—big or tiny—once thought good for nothing are bringing joy to the lives of city dwellers.
Among the more unusual projects we examine is the High Line, an elevated railway line running through New York City that is being transformed into a park.
Trends: urban forests
02/08/2008
This week Trends and Products is about urban forests, with physicist Dr Peter Fisher, who emailed us in response to our Conversation in June with the Melbourne City Council's Rob Adams. Dr Fisher has a passion for old-fashioned shade from trees and plants, and is lobbying hard for urban forests. He is a climate change consultant and research fellow at the Central Queensland University.
In Conversation: Chefs from the warzone
19/07/2008
This week a conversation with Tania Cammerano, editor of the on-line food site taste.com.au, about what it takes to be a TV chef and why the world of TV chefdom is a little bit weird these days.
We're in a situation now where two networks are airing Gordon Ramsey's TV shows, so Ramsey scholars can get a good look at his development. He was an angry man to begin with but it's worth asking whether the drama and histrionics on his TV shows now are pure theatre or whether they do reflect what goes on behind the scenes in real life.
What has his behaviour to do with his background as a chef? In his autobiography, he talks about the kitchen mostly in war/military terms, "like Baghdad, the pans rained down on my head like gunfire".
What about the alternative? Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray of the influential River Café in London talk about how "great conditions make great chefs, great restaurants and better food". They restrict their chefs working hours and make sure they have full weekends off. They believe in nurturing talent. Their list of alumni is astounding: Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Darren Simpson and Ben O'Donoghue.
Which approach produces better, more successful chefs and what do we mean in this context by success?
Guerrilla gardeners
12/07/2008
Horticulturalist and activist Richard Reynolds is on a mission to bring to our awareness the potential of the unused, abandoned and unloved garden spaces of our cities. His city is London. At night he and his team drive, walk, or cycle to 'their' abandoned lot—which could be simply an unruly sidewalk of weeds struggling through concrete or a traffic roundabout—and the action starts. Out come the daisies or lavender or Californian poppies—whatever is in season—and their night of guerrilla gardening has begun.
Avant gardeners: what no plants?
21/06/2008
UK author and journalist Tim Richardson is equally at home in an 18th century garden, he says, as in a very contemporary 'conceptual' garden. In his latest book, Avant Gardeners, Tim profiles the work of 50 contemporary landscapes worldwide, and takes us behind the thinking of these gardens. Why make a garden from blue sticks, or a garden full of glass shards? Whatever happened to plants?
Edible Estates: re-inventing the front lawn
12/04/2008
Fitz Haeg is an architect and artist, and a keen environmental activist in the process. His approach is to tackle the front lawn and his project Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn started in 2005 - in Salina, Texas - with the object to replace the domestic front lawn with a highly productive, edible, organic garden landscape. Fritz's initiative aims to affect change in urban and suburban commities alike, one front lawn at a time.
