A Sydney studio for living green spaces

Hello — I'm Chris

I've been doing this since long before it was a job. Growing up I was the kid who was always out the back — germinating seeds just to see what would happen, training bonsai with more patience than I had for anything else at that age, endlessly rearranging my plants so they sat well together. I didn't know that last part was design. I just knew it bothered me when they looked neglected.

It came from both sides of the family. My grandmother worked in a garden centre, my parents are serious gardeners, and plants were simply what we did. Some families pass down a football team.

Bonsai in particular taught me something that turns out to matter enormously in this work: a plant is never finished. You're not installing an object and walking away — you're starting something that needs attention every week, for years, if it's going to be worth looking at.

It taught me how trees actually grow, too — where a tree pushes new growth after a cut, which bud takes over when you take the leader off, how structure builds up over years. It's the same botany at full size. So when I prune a ficus indoors or a tree in a courtyard, I'm thinking about where I want it in three years, not just how tidy it looks today.

The work came next. Four years in nurseries and on farms in Melbourne and Queensland — growing the things, at scale, in everything from temperate to subtropical, and learning what a plant under stress looks like a fortnight before it shows. Then a stint landscaping in Vancouver, and two years designing and maintaining commercial interior planting there. Behind all of it, an honours degree in environmental science from the University of Wollongong — my research was on environmental flows in the Lake Illawarra catchment, which is a long way of saying I spent a year working out how much water a stream needs to stay healthy, and how you'd actually measure that rather than guess. Honestly that's the part that shapes how I work most. It teaches you to read a place as a system: how light moves through it across a day, where the air is dry, how water actually behaves in a pot. Horticulture teaches you which plants answer those conditions. Put the two together and you stop guessing. I turn up with a light meter and a moisture meter and take readings, because eyes adjust to a dim room and meters don't.

That's why I started florascape. I wanted to take on fewer jobs and do them properly — the kind of work where someone walks in two years later and it still looks considered.