The Sky Garden near ornamental lake, 2024, digital image, dimensions variable. Photo: Helen Vivian.

Helen Vivian reflects on that re-wilding project that enabled a garden to grow a temple.

“The Mallee Sky-Garden, in Victoria’s northwest corner, lies within the ancient ancestral lands of the Nyeri Nyeri Peoples. The People of the Nyeri Nyeri are thankful and welcome this beautiful garden to take its position within these lands and most importantly to continue its gift of forever giving life.”

Nyeri Nyeri elder Mark Grist, Grist Archaeology.

 I did not plan for any of this. It just grew. You can’t plan when you do not yet know where the garden may take you. That is not to say that I haven’t done enormous amounts of research and put great thought into every planting. One flight of fancy I have is to paper the walls of a gallery with all my spreadsheets. It is astounding how many I have created and how detailed they are. Listing every plant species that has ever been recorded in the area. About 40% of these endemic species are now listed as rare or endangered, and it is my mission to bring them all together in the Sky Garden. But I did not know this at the start, in 2015.

I am a curator (of contemporary art). Curator is also the title given to the creator of a garden. However, the big difference with a garden is that the curator is also the maker. That and the element of time. To make a garden, you have to be able to imagine what it will be like in 100 years time: the story it will tell to visitors. Some of my plantings are designed to tell a very particular story.

Like the orchard. Planted to honour the horticultural history that has transformed this landscape into a food bowl and the diverse multicultural communities that work it. I placed the orchard rows on an angle to the native garden and keep it mowed and the edges trimmed. Its manicured lines are punctuated by a row of Italian pencil pines and English roses, with an abundant underplanting of mixed bulbs and iris that pop up in early Spring (like seasonal workers). The rich colours and formal design create a strong contrast to the softness of the native garden.

The orchard is surrounded by a new planting of native grasses and Murray Pine trees. I imagine visitors a hundred years from now, thinking that the magnificent pines sheltering them from the sun must have been cut down to make way for the orchard. Indeed, they were right across the district until less than 1% of the endemic Murray pine forests remain in Vic and NSW. But here, the story has been reversed.

Re-wilding the Mallee is like re-writing the history of this landscape backwards. First, I erased the lines of the orchard and vines etched into the surface layer. Next, I terraformed a series of rolling dune formations to mimic the dune fields of the nearby Murray Sunset National Park and provide a range of habitats suited to different plant species. Then, a voyage of plant discovery began, venturing into Terra Ignota, because a garden is time travel.

The Sky Garden did not begin as a re-wilding project. It began with a collection of rare and endangered West Australian plants and seeds bequeathed by the late great Graeme O’Neill. There are now about seventy-five rare species in the garden. I began with native grasses and a sheltering ring of trees. Along the way, the eye learns the subtle beauty of indigenous plants like the local grass Austrostipa elegantissima, Brachyscome and Olearia daisies, saltbush and Eremophila species, and the coral-like forms of mallee eucalypts.

Recent multi-disciplinary research has revealed that traditional land management practices in the region were greatly disrupted as early as the 1830s,100 years prior to irrigated horticulture, and had ceased by 1850 due to the decimation of the indigenous population. Traditional owner land management produced large grassy plains and grassy woodlands with pines as the dominant tree and often with wells. There are frequent reports of scenic and park-like areas in early reports. Here’s an example  from 1890:

“Its richness and the beauty of the vegetation were a surprise… For miles in all directions belts and clumps of pine, myall, belar, bulloak and apple bush were growing in rich luxuriance. It was like a great park on which infinite skill had been expended to produce striking landscape effects.”

And so the garden led me by the hand into another terra ignota, the indigenous history of the area. This is not my story to tell, but the garden and everything that grows here will. The discovery that Murray Pines were cultivated by traditional owners and that this landscape was not mallee, as I had originally thought, but pine forest, was like a bell ringing: one of those Tibetan bells that resonates infinitely.

And another… I met Sister Chan, a Vietnamese Buddhist nun, walking in the garden three years ago. I  soon discovered that she had been a disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh, studying at Plum Village, his monastery in the south of France. Thich Nhat Hanh is known as the father of mindfulness and the greatest inspiration for engaged Buddhism and Western Buddhist practice. He was a poet, prolific writer, and peace activist nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Martin Luther King Jr. Sister Chan had been sent to establish a Temple and Zen meditation centre in Mildura and was looking for some land. So, I offered her a portion of the newly landscaped second block, now known as the Temple Garden.

I am not a Buddhist, but during difficult times in my life, I listen to Thich Nhat Hanh’s recordings. Like most people, I am familiar with Zen philosophy and like to apply it to everyday things, like Zen in the art of housework or trying to be at peace with flies swarming in your face when gardening. And like trying to have compassion for the suffering of others, from the microbiome to the tallest tree. And, of course, the suffering we all experience in life.

These are not great and noble thoughts, but they are things of great practical importance and use to us.

So far, on our temple building journey, we have obtained a planning permit for the Sky Temple, established a Board of governance, a not-for-profit association, become a registered charity, built a website and strong community support, raised $150,000 and are in the process of creating a new land title for the Sky Temple which will be gifted to Sister Chan and the Sky Temple Pty Ltd. The Sky Temple will belong to the community and will be built by the community. The architect is at work, and we hope to start building in 2025/2026.

I imagine telling my farmer father about the garden I made and how it grew a temple, as well as beautiful artworks by Domenico de Clario and Stevie Fieldsend. The garden itself is an artwork, a vast land sculpture with a delicate painting of plants applied to its surface.  “Pie in the Sky” he would say. That is how the garden got its name: a celebration of blue sky dreaming. But the temple is not named for the garden, it is named for Thich Nhat Hanh: Hanh (xanh) means blue sky in Vietnamese.

I did plan some aspects of this journey, but the paths have forked so many times, and new things have grown up where once there was only a flat, empty paddock growing weeds. I want to acknowledge landscape architect Cath Stutterheim for the original landscape plan on the first 7-hectare block where this story began. We are now planting block 4, and the garden has grown to 30 hectares.

The making of the Mallee Sky Garden and the journey towards the building of a Buddhist Temple and Zen meditation centre in Irymple, near Mildura, is a voyage of discovery that can be followed at www.skytemplemildura.com.au.

You have to start with insufficient knowledge…you have to have that kind of courage…

There isn’t time to wait for grace…Think of a worm’s blind rearing at the edgeof a leaf, or a skydiver turning somersaults:you have to have that kind of courage.

you have to start with insufficient knowledge…

Excerpted from Insufficient Knowledge, Bronwyn Lea

About Helen Vivien

Helen Vivian is the Curator of the Mallee Sky Garden and a board member of Sky Temple Mildura Pty Ltd., a not-for-profit company and registered charity. Helen has worked as a Curator of contemporary art, curating many exhibitions including Mildura Palimpsest Biennale (2011, 2013, 2015), and published When You Think About Art, Macmillan Australia, 2008. Helen has a B.A. Environmental Design, 1983; and a M.A. in Environmental Studies, 1986; both from the University of Tasmania; and a Master of Arts in Visual Culture, from Monash University, 2004. The Sky Garden brings her passion for art and nature together on a thirty-acre canvas.

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Buddhism | G37 | garden | temple | Victoria