Broadmeadows spawns winner of Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show garden design competition
10 April 2002
Susan Meli, winner of the Student Ideas and Design Competition.
At today's official opening of the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, it was announced that Susan Meli, a horticulture graduate of Kangan Batman TAFE, had won the show's prestigious Student Ideas and Design Competition.
As winner of the competition, Susan will receive the Don Fleming Student Award, provided by Fleming's Nurseries. Her prize, valued at around $9,000, is a trip for two to England to attend the Chelsea Flower Show.
After 20 years as a nurse, Susan completed the Certificate IV in Horticulture - Landscape Design over four years on a part-time basis at Kangan Batman TAFE's Broadmeadows campus. It was there she heard about the competition.
The competition required entrants to design a garden based on the theme of 'A Living Masterpiece'. Susan was one of four students (one from NZ, one from NSW and another Victorian) whose designs were selected to be constructed at the show.
Susan chose a literary masterpiece - A Midsummer Night's Dream - as the theme of her garden, to highlight the "power of gardens to touch human emotions across all generations, as do timeless masterpieces like the works of Shakespeare."
Based on the play's final scene which deals with themes such as magic vs reality, Susan's garden design aims to create a surreal dreamlike feeling. It includes features such as a one metre high statue of Puck, a river of mirrors, lighting that recreates moonlight, and a mist machine.
While she still works two days-a-week as an operating theatre nurse, Susan now spends the rest of her week working for clients of her own garden design business.
"I really love nursing, and it would be very hard for me to leave it, but I always thought that after 20 years IÂ'd try something different,” she explains.
Aside from having worked in a nursery, Susan says she chose to study horticulture because she had always enjoyed working in her own garden, which she hopes one day to enter in the Open Garden Scheme. She had also coordinated working bees to revamp the gardens at her daughter's primary school.
When she returns from taking her prize holiday to England, Susan will continue to build her garden design business. However she is not yet finished with study, and also plans to complete the Diploma of Garden Design.
"When I first qualified in perioperative nursing, I swore I'd had enough of study, but then years later here I am, studying something new and loving it," she says.
"I hate hearing other people my age saying 'I wish I'd studied such and such when I was young'. I tell them to just go and do it, because life's too short to have regrets."
Kangan Batman TAFE also had another success at the Flower and Garden Show, when the display created by its horticulture teachers and students won a Silver Medal in the Outdoor Exhibit category.
Entitled The Rising Water Table, the display features mannequins drinking overflowing glasses of water at a dining setting which is in a pond, giving the impression that it is rising from the water.
The exhibit's theme refers to the serious environmental issue of high salt content in soil, due to the over use of water in horticulture/agriculture and the reduction of forests. Many plant species are unable to survive in soil with high levels of salinity, in particular indigenous plants and shallow rooting/annual plants such as crops.
To contact Susan Meli and her business, Fundamental Garden Designs, email sjmeli@bigpond.net.au
