What is a Garden?

Participants

Emmaline Bowman
Emmaline Bowman is a multi-award-winning Landscape Architect and Director of STEM Landscape Architecture & Design. Growing up on her family farm, her deep love of animals and fascination with waterways shaped a lifelong commitment to environmentally responsive design. Through STEM, Emmaline creates landscapes that work in harmony with nature, specialising in Australian flora and habitat-driven design that enhances beauty, supports wildlife and promotes biodiversity. Her work is grounded in ecological restoration and driven by a desire to reconnect people with the natural world. Emmaline first gained industry recognition after winning 1st place in the Boutique Garden category at the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show. Her wetland project, later featured on Gardening Australia, led to a guest host role across four episodes. Since then, STEM has transformed both rural and urban environments, restoring ageing dams into thriving wetlands, including one that became habitat for the endangered Growling Grass Frog. STEM’s work has been featured in The Design Files, House & Garden, The Herald Sun & The Age. At the 2025 Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show, in collaboration with ID Landscaping, STEM was awarded Best in Show Gold along with five other major awards. Driven by innovation, sustainability and ecological restoration, Emmaline continues to push the boundaries of contemporary landscape design.

Alistair Kirkpatrick
Alistair has 25 years of experience spanning academia, landscape architecture, and ecology, with a specialised focus on Melbourne’s diverse vegetation communities. A lifelong advocate and lover of the plant kingdom, he is dedicated to preserving remnant ecologies while embracing the opportunities that novel ecologies present within urban environments. Throughout his career, Alistair has designed more than 50 gardens across Melbourne, Sydney, and London. He has been invited to serve as a judge for Landscaping Victoria over a three-year period and has exhibited five times at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, earning a Gold Medal in 2023 for Karrakin, a collaborative project with Elliot Summers of Stratis Landscape Architecture.His work has been published in academic journals and featured extensively in Landscape Architecture Australia. Alistair currently teaches horticulture and landscape design at Melbourne Polytechnic.

Bede Brennan
Bede is a landscape architect at SBLA, and has been fortunate to write for Wonderground Press, Kerb Journal and Landscape Australia over the years, present at the AILA Festival and MPavilion, and teach a variety of subjects at the University of Melbourne. Growing up in the rainforest of northern NSW gave him a fascination with – and an eye for – entanglements we can have with the more-than-human world. He’ll take any chance he can to re-immerse himself in, or share, that way of seeing the world. But he’s also fascinated by the unheralded, daggy and unpolished suburbia of the Australian Ugliness he now lives in (Brunswick West), which has led him into the strange ongoing project that is Shitgardens. Most recently he’s been working on a series of interviews with Shane Reiner Roth of UCLA (and @everyverything), the first of which features artist Mike Hewson. You can see a preview on the Shitgardens Instagram.

Gini Lee
Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Melbourne AILA Registered Landscape Architect Gini Lee is a landscape architect, interior designer and pastoralist and is Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia and was the Elisabeth Murdoch Chair of Landscape Architecture (2011-2017). Prior to this she was the Professor of Landscape Architecture at Queensland University of Technology (2008-2011) and Head of School at the University of South Australia (1999-2004), moving to academia after many years in Landscape Architecture and Interior Design practice and consultancy based from her Melbourne studio. Her academic focus in research and teaching is on cultural and critical landscape architecture and spatial interior design theory and studio practice, to engage with the curation and postproduction of complex landscapes. Focusing on arid environments, her multidisciplinary research into the water landscapes of remote territories contributes to the scientific, cultural, and Indigenous understanding of and management strategies for fragile landscapes. Her recent landscape curation and installation practice is an experiment with postproduction and Deep Mapping methods to investigate the cultural and scientific landscapes of remote and rural Australia, Scandinavia, global archipelagos and the arid lands of western USA. From 2014-2018 she was an invited researcher at SLU Malmo where she collaborated in fieldwork based research into transect travel methodologies. She is a registered landscape architect and contributes to the strategic planning, design and practice of urban and educational landscapes in Melbourne and beyond, was the past Executive Editor of the IDEA Journal (2009-2011), a past member of the Queensland Heritage Council (2010-2011) and the past Chair of art + place for Arts Queensland prior to leaving the State for Victoria. She was an appointee to the New Zealand PBRF as international expert for design (2003, 2006, 2011-2012), to the City of Melbourne's Parks and Gardens Advisory Committee (2012-) and Chairs the University's Landscape and Open Space Committee.

Jakobi lli-Jakobi, Petrichor Collaborative
Jakobi is a Djab Wurrung and Dhauwurd Wurrung man, cultural educator, emerging biocultural scientist and storyteller. Currently studying Plant Science (B-SCIEXTD) at the University of Melbourne, he has a passion for place-based storytelling, embedding biocultural scientific ways of knowing to inspire different perspectives on land, water and ecology. He believes that urban renaturalisation is an important step towards Caring for Country and is driven to contribute to events and projects that support Caring for Country and Traditional Owner desires for environmental restoration.