Journey Beyond the Tracks
Award-winning landscape designer Max Parker-Smith travelled the Indian Pacific and came home with a notebook full of ideas. What followed was a garden at Chelsea that brought Australia to the world stage.
WORDS Martin Perry
PHOTOGRAPHY Martin Perry, Chris Morrison, Jonathan Hordle & Inhouse Images
A sudden breeze bends the branches of a eucalyptus tree a few feet away, making its leaves catch the light. Halfway up, what appears to be a koala looks back at me, albeit a stuffed toy variety. I’m standing inside a slatted structure that bears an uncanny resemblance to a vintage train carriage. A break in the clouds sends afternoon sun across an area of red ochre gravel, picking out familiar plants: boronias with their distinctive star-shaped flowers, kangaroo paw, and plenty of others I can’t name. I half expect a wallaby to hop past, but this is about as far from the Australian outback as it’s possible to get. I’m in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in central London, at the award-winning Journey Beyond the Tracks: Adelaide to Perth garden at the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show — a collaboration between Journey Beyond, the South Australian Tourism Commission and Tourism Western Australia, celebrating the Indian Pacific and the nature cities of Adelaide and Perth.
The tracks themselves, of course, are very much in Australia, connecting the country’s east and west coasts from Sydney to Perth via Adelaide. Upon them runs one of the most epic train journeys in the world: the Indian Pacific, named after the two oceans it connects. It’s a journey I’ve had the pleasure of taking, as has the garden’s designer, Max Parker-Smith, who has kindly taken a few minutes out of his day to guide me around with infectious enthusiasm, and with good reason. Earlier today he was awarded a Silver Gilt Medal, one of the RHS’s highest honours. Visitors to the garden are immediately drawn to the central pergola structure, a reclaimed greenheart timber frame that echoes the form and interior of an Indian Pacific carriage, its natural grain revealed after the best part of a century spent in the sea off the Kent coast, topped with strips of weathered cor-ten steel. The 10 x 14 metre space unfolds on either side of it as two distinct landscapes. To the east, seven asymmetrically planted acacia trees stand above a formal paved area where water flows from a boulder. To the west, planting loosens into red granite gravel, a direct reference to Australia’s iconic red earth, with resilient native species echoing the expansive shrub plains of the Western Australian outback. On the opposite side, the garden shifts character entirely, reflecting Adelaide’s identity as a National Park City: trees, natural water corridors and layered vegetation that speaks to the city’s green urban vision.
The garden is attracting considerable attention from Chelsea’s famously exacting crowds. At first glance it appears deceptively simple, low, relatively sparse planting and minimal architectural elements. But as Max guides me around, carefully considered details begin to emerge. With 113 years of history and a roll call of gardening luminaries as long as a prize-winning gladiola stem, Chelsea has become embedded in the British social calendar alongside Ascot and the Proms. It is watched by 22 million people on the BBC each year, and this season, Australia has arrived at its heart. The fact that Max based his garden on an Australian train journey is no accident. The country holds deep personal significance for him. He first travelled there at 23. “It was one of the most pivotal moments of my life,” he tells me, producing a notebook filled with photographs and handwritten notes made while working on farms and gardens across Australia a decade ago. “The trip was transformative, it was on it that I made the decision to study garden design.” At the time he had no idea those notes would one day help shape a career-defining garden at the world’s most important horticultural show.
Among the scheduled stops is Cook, a border town at the western edge of South Australia where water tanks are replenished and guests step off to explore. In its 1930s heyday, Cook’s population reached 200. Today, four people remain to service the passing trains. Abandoned buildings, a school, a small prison, still stand as quiet testimony to the impermanence of human activity and nature’s patient reclamation of what we leave behind. Max touches on this in the garden’s design, incorporating a boulder salvaged from Cook as his water feature and repurposing discarded railway pegs as hooks. The garden’s commitment to sustainability runs deeper than aesthetic, it is a prerequisite of the RHS’s strict environmental guidelines. After the show, the gardens were rehomed to Kensington Gardens as part of a partnership with The Royal Parks focused on creating climate-resilient green spaces for future generations. The hard landscaping will travel to Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, where it will form an Australian garden to complement the estate’s existing Koala Creek experience, home to the only population of southern koalas in Europe, animals that came originally from Cleland in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia. A full-circle conclusion that feels entirely fitting.
Beyond Cook, the train moves out across the Nullarbor, one of the largest, flattest places on the planet, and part of the Kwongan, the Noongar word for the sand plains of Western Australia. Here, plants have evolved to survive in nutrient-poor sand under extreme heat and drought, many of which Max has incorporated into his design. His interest in them goes beyond aesthetics. “In most parts of the world we are depleting our soil levels at such a rate that potentially, at some point, we might be looking at these types of plants to cope with those challenges,” he says. The Nullarbor itself made a deep impression on him. “Traversing it was a complete surprise. There’s a richness there with a quiet, unassuming beauty. What initially feels rugged or sparse reveals a surprising wealth of life the longer you look. Being there forces you to slow down and observe, to really see a landscape that feels ancient, resilient and largely untouched. There’s a sense of perspective that comes from that, moments where you feel small in the best possible way, grounded by the scale, age and life of the land.” Having made this journey myself, I understand exactly where Max is coming from. There is something undeniably humbling about moving through landscapes this vast and this ancient, and something that insists you acknowledge something greater than yourself.
That sense of awe in the face of ancient Australian landscape is something Aboriginal peoples have carried for millennia — not as wonder at something foreign, but as fluency in something deeply known. The Yindjibarndi people of the Pilbara, for example, hold detailed ecological knowledge of desert systems: which plants germinate after particular rain patterns, which animals appear in specific micro-habitats. Central to that understanding is no separation between people and land. It is a relationship that gardeners like Max, in their own way, are reaching toward. Gardens, perhaps, are one of the last places many of us get close to that kind of connection, to nurture something, and be nurtured in return. The Indian Pacific offers another. To travel slowly through the ancient landscapes of South and Western Australia, watching the country change through panoramic windows, is to be reminded that Australia has a way of surprising you. Often when you least expect it.
THE DETAILS
There are few ways to understand Australia quite like crossing it by train. The Indian Pacific runs between Sydney and Perth via Adelaide, taking four days to traverse the continent through the red earth of the outback, across the vast Nullarbor Plain and into the green hills of Western Australia. Prefer to focus on the west? The Adelaide to Perth leg captures the journey’s most dramatic shift in landscape. It’s all-inclusive, unhurried and unlike anything else.