The community garden experience < our gardens

FINCAing Fremantle -
innovative design produces a community asset

Story: Martin Anda; Photos: Russ Grayson

The view from the vegetable garden terrace over the community park shows the lawn area and children's sandpit and play area. The constructed dune with its native vegetation parallels the street. With the sea across the road, the Casuarina trees planted along the street and other windbreaks will shelter the park from salt-laden winds.

The vegetable terrace is irrigated by a subsurface greywater system and supports a diversity of vegetables and herbs adapted to the region's Mediterranean climate.

Viewed from the shelter, the young food forest basin is traversed by a footbridge leading to an entrance arch. Like the vegetable terrace, the basin is irrigated by greywater.

An existing building was converted into a shelter. The brick walls were bagged with coloured concrete and a pergola erected as a roof over which a vine is grown to provide shade. Timber has been reused to make a table and bench seats.

FINCA's small city park in Fremantle, Westen Australia, shows an ingenuity of design combining food and native plants, children's play and adult relaxation areas, all irrigated by unwanted rainwater from surrounding roofs...

Fremantle Inner City Agriculture (FINCA) is a community-based, local permaculture group in Fremantle.

FINCA has established a permaculture community garden on the site of a former council park called King William Park, which was, basically, an uncared for patch of dead grass with a rusty old swing on it.

The park, a project whose success has been due to the nexus between artists and permaculturists, is now a beautiful, rich example of coastal permaculture with thriving green plants and trees in profusion.

Greywater sustains plants

The community garden includes a terraced Mediterranean zone of herbs, flowers and vegetables irrigated by an innovative greywater reuse system that does not allow the aquifer below or the ocean to become polluted by nutrients.

Subsurface irrigation avoids the risk of pathogen contact if they are at all present.

Design

The central lawn area is dedicated to public gatherings and children's play with a new swing, sandpit, a weeping mulberry cave and more to come in future.

The lawn is irrigated by a subsurface system. A low-water-use variety of grass has been planted.

The site is well-endowered with stone arches, entrance ways, mosaics, ceramic tiles depicting local heritage and other features.

Coastal dune windbreak

Protecting the area from the winter westerly winds is a regenerated coastal dune with endemic coastal species (no irrigation) and a street verge planted with the local, hardy windbreakl tree - Salt Sheoak.

The south end of the dune rises to a high point which is now known by its Nyoongar (Aboriginal) name of Ngulla Jenu - literally 'out track' - but with deeper ecological and communitarian meanings.

This hill is planted out with bushtucker species. Limestone boulders on top of the hill provide excellent views of the surrounding coast.

Food forest in a basin

As Ngulla Jenu hill falls away to the south, one enters the basin where a lush food forest will in future grow from the current plantings of almond, guavas, asparagus, New Zealand flax, Chilean wine palm and olive. Interplanted with this mini-forest are acacias and herbs.

The food forest basin irself can be traversed by means of a wooden footbridge and the whole area is protected from the salty westerly winds by a dense windbreak of numerous local, hardy trees and shrubs.

This area can also be irrigated by the greywater system by means of a hidden diverter valve. Rainwater from the roofs of adjacent houses is piped into the basin.

Top corner

The top corner of the site includes a children's teahouse surrounded by weeping mulberries, citrus, bay tree, herbs and flowers.

An active FINCA

FINCA also promotes the Green Plan for south and central Fremantle, maintains Florence Community Park (now the community garden) and a food forest in the front yard of Beaconsfield Out of School Care Centre, holds member's backyard busy bees and lots more.

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PAGE UPDATED... Friday, 1 March 2002