The Landscape Architect Turning Stormwater Basins Into Living Gardens

In Perth, rain can arrive with theatrical force after months of blue skies. Streets flood, sandy soils shift water quickly, and a drainage reserve can spend most of the year looking like an awkward gap between houses. Landscape architect Asha Reid sees a different opportunity: a stormwater basin can be useful infrastructure, a generous public garden and a piece of local ecology at the same time.

Her work sits within the growing Australian interest in water-sensitive urban design. Reid designs planted depressions, wetlands and rain gardens that collect runoff from roofs, roads and paved courtyards, then slow, filter and release it. The result is infrastructure with a civic presence—spaces that are practical during a downpour and inviting on an ordinary summer afternoon.

From Drainage Reserve To Public Room

Reid’s interest began with a suburban drainage basin in Perth’s northern corridor. It had been fenced, mown and treated as a technical object, even though children cut across the grass on their way to school and neighbours walked around its perimeter each evening. “The basin already had a social life,” she says. “It just wasn’t designed to support one.”

Her studio approached the site as a piece of landscape rather than a hole that needed filling. A broad, gently graded bowl became the central garden, with a dry path tracing the upper edge and a small crossing linking two streets. During heavy rain, the low area receives stormwater. Between events, it becomes a place for informal play, dog walking and seasonal planting.

That shift in thinking is important across Australia, where new housing estates often dedicate land to drainage but struggle to make it feel like part of the neighbourhood. Reid argues that a basin should be legible as both infrastructure and landscape. People should understand where water goes, while still feeling welcome to linger beside it.

Designing For Perth’s Long Dry Season

The first design conversation is always about climate. Perth’s Mediterranean conditions bring wet winters, hot dry summers and increasingly unpredictable rainfall. A planting palette that looks lush in June may be impossible to sustain in January, particularly when local authorities are trying to reduce irrigation demand and households are watching their water use.

Reid avoids treating a basin as a conventional garden with a low point in the middle. She establishes different planting zones according to how often each area is likely to be wet. The base may hold sedges, rushes and hardy wetland species, while the upper banks use flowering groundcovers, grasses and small trees suited to dry conditions.

This approach creates a garden that changes visibly through the year. Winter rain lifts the green canopy and fills temporary pools. Spring brings seed heads, insects and bursts of colour. By late summer, the basin may look quieter and more textural, with mulch, stone and resilient foliage carrying the composition. The landscape does not pretend that Perth is another climate.

Working on Whadjuk Noongar Country also requires attention to place and cultural context. Reid’s projects use local ecological knowledge, engage with appropriate consultants and avoid presenting native planting as a decorative shortcut. Species selection, water movement and public access are considered together, with the aim of making landscapes that belong to their setting rather than simply borrowing its visual language.

The Basin As A Living Machine

A successful bio-retention garden performs several tasks in sequence. Stormwater enters through a swale, inlet or shallow channel, where larger debris can be caught before water spreads across planted soil. The soil profile then helps remove sediment and pollutants, while roots and microorganisms contribute to filtration. Excess water can move into an underdrain or overflow route during a major event.

The technical work is largely invisible, but Reid says the invisible parts cannot be treated as secondary. Soil depths, overflow levels, inlet protection and maintenance access shape the garden’s long-term performance. A beautiful basin that blocks its outlet or loses its planting after one wet season is a failed landscape, regardless of how attractive it appeared at handover.

Her drawings therefore include maintenance teams from the beginning. Access points are positioned so crews can inspect pits, clear sediment and replace plants without trampling the whole garden. Edges are made robust enough for mowing or slashing where necessary, while the most sensitive planted zones receive clearer protection.

The best outcome is a system that becomes more convincing as it matures. Water marks, volunteer seedlings, leaf litter and changing plant heights reveal the basin’s work. Rather than hiding the function, Reid gives it visual clarity through contours, bridges, stone edges and carefully framed views.

A Garden With A Practical Brief

The public experience matters as much as hydraulic performance. Reid often begins with a simple question: what should a person be able to do here when there is no storm? The answer might be walking, sitting, watching birds, taking a shortcut or meeting a neighbour after school pickup.

That everyday use influences the geometry. Paths sit above the expected inundation level and are aligned with existing desire lines. Benches face the planted depression instead of a road. Low mounds provide places to pause without turning the area into a formal park. Lighting, where required, is restrained so it supports movement without erasing the dusk activity of insects and birds.

Safety is addressed through visibility rather than excessive fencing. Clear sightlines, shallow slopes and obvious crossings make the space easier to read. Reid is wary of the familiar Australian pattern in which drainage land is surrounded by barriers and warning signs, leaving residents to experience it only as a restriction.

The work also demonstrates that ecological value does not have to be remote from daily life. A basin beside a community centre in Fremantle can offer habitat while children learn where rain travels. A residential street in Joondalup can gain shade and seasonal interest from a landscape that quietly protects downstream waterways.

Material Choices That Respect Water

Materials are chosen with the same discipline as plants. Permeable paving, compacted gravel and recycled brick can help reduce runoff, while stone and concrete are reserved for places that need to handle concentrated flows or heavy use. Reid prefers materials that weather honestly and can be repaired without replacing an entire surface.

The palette is not austere. A warm aggregate edge can sit beside silver-leaved shrubs, and a simple timber seat can give a wetland garden a domestic scale. Her approach has a useful relationship with the wider Australian interiors conversation, where natural stone is increasingly selected for its veining and tactile depth. The same attention appears in the recent interest in Verde Alpi marble, although Reid uses local and recycled materials where water infrastructure demands greater resilience.

Colour is handled carefully. Bright planting is concentrated at entrances and gathering points, while the basin itself relies on greens, ochres and changing textures. This keeps the composition legible during flood events and avoids a theme-park version of native landscaping.

For Reid, material restraint is a form of generosity. It leaves room for water, plants and people to become the visual focus. It also supports a more realistic maintenance budget, an important consideration for councils and strata communities managing landscapes over decades rather than a single launch season.

What Makes The Detail Work

The project team’s decisions are guided by a compact set of principles:

The most successful basins also share practical qualities that are easy to miss in photographs:

This balance between performance and pleasure is where landscape architecture earns its value. A civil engineering solution may move water efficiently, while a garden can make that movement understandable and memorable. Reid’s role is to bring those disciplines together early enough that neither is forced to compromise at the end.

Her studio works with hydrologists, civil engineers, ecologists, council officers and community groups. The process can be slower than delivering a standard grassed basin, but the result avoids the costly cycle of retrofits, failed plants and public complaints. In a market where development programs are tightly scheduled, that collaborative work has to be built into the brief from day one.

A Broader Role For Landscape Practice

Reid’s projects belong to a larger shift in how Australian cities understand landscape. Water-sensitive urban design is moving beyond demonstration gardens and award submissions into subdivisions, school grounds, commercial sites and transport corridors. In Perth, the need is especially immediate as infill development increases hard surfaces and puts pressure on aging drainage networks.

The work is also changing the profile of the landscape architect. The role is no longer limited to planting plans, paving patterns or the finishing layer around a building. Landscape architects are helping define how sites store water, support biodiversity, create shade and offer public benefit. Their decisions influence the experience of a street long after the architecture has been photographed.

That wider cultural role connects with the conversations fostered by Contemporary ambassadors, where design professionals contribute knowledge across architecture, interiors, objects and place-making. Reid’s practice belongs to that same connected field: a basin may begin as a stormwater requirement, yet it can become part of a richer discussion about climate, care and civic identity.

There is an opportunity for the design industry to treat these spaces with greater ambition. Developers can commission landscape input before drainage layouts are fixed. Councils can assess public life alongside engineering compliance. Architects can position buildings to overlook and support water landscapes rather than turning their backs on them.

In Perth, that ambition is visible in the details: a path that remains usable after rain, a shady tree planted where people actually wait, a wetland edge that attracts dragonflies, and a basin that feels like a garden rather than leftover land. To see how local makers and design practices are shaping the wider creative community, explore the Wine in Design exhibitors and the ideas they bring to the city.

Landscape architect Asha Reid’s stormwater gardens offer a grounded proposition for Australian cities: infrastructure can be generous. It can clean water, shelter wildlife, cool a neighbourhood and give people somewhere to go. The next time a drainage basin appears on a development plan, it may be worth seeing the low ground as the beginning of a public place, not the end of a building site.

Follow the work of landscape architects, engineers and designers rethinking urban water, and make space for these hybrid landscapes in the projects, policies and conversations shaping Australia’s future.