Melbourne Polytechnic student Morayo Adeyemi (Momo) won the Most Creative Use of Space Award and a Gold Medal in the Achievable Garden category for her Alafia Australis installation at the 2025 Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. Congratulations Momo!
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Interview by Sandra Schwarz
My design is called Alafia Australis, which translates to ‘wellbeing down under’ from the languages of Yoruba and Latin. It’s a healing garden that blends traditions in the West Coast of Africa and the East Coast of Australia. As a designer, I love to bridge people and communities together, through the use of plants and outdoor space. It’s a great medium for promoting wellbeing, at both an individual and community level.
What inspired your design?
One touchpoint is that back in 2009 my grandmother came from Nigeria to visit my family, and she was this very joyous elder, that had a lot of support back in Nigeria. Elders are very important in Yoruba culture, and then coming to Australia was quite the opposite. Sometimes I think about how I could’ve been a better grandchild to her, and if I had had the skills that I have now, I would have created a garden for her, or introduced some plants from Australia, as well as from Nigeria, that she would have really loved to interact with on a daily basis. The Black Saturday bushfire happened right after she came, and it missed our house by an inch, the wind changed. She was pretty traumatised by that experience.
I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to appreciate plants (during landscape architecture studies) and what they could bring. I guess during Covid-19 is when I started getting really into plants, and thinking ‘how do I bridge this knowledge gap?’ Then free TAFE came up, so I decided to go into the course at Melbourne Polytechnic (Cert. 3 – Horticulture) and it’s been the best decision I’ve made in my life.
The second touchpoint comes from my great aunt, who had a heritage house in Lagos. It was a blend of an English heritage home, with a West African layout framework, which is typically anchored by a central courtyard, with rooms and archways leading outwards from it. It didn’t shy away from having arches, which is quite typical in West African vernacular architecture, and so I thought about bringing some of that into design as well. It’s meant to look like rammed earth, which is a traditional building method all across Africa and other parts of the world. So, the purpose came from my first grandma and the form comes from the other grandma (great aunt).
The third touchpoint is from my studies at Melbourne Poly (Polytechnic), where I discovered Indigofera australis*. The name sounded really familiar, and I realised it’s the same genus as the Indigofera used in Africa and India. It also has the same use (dye), so I thought I’d play around with finding common genera between the two continents.
*Momo used these plants to dye a fabric sample and her overalls, pictured.
Let’s hear a little more about YOUR story.
I was born in Nigeria, in Lagos, and lived there until I was about 7 or 8 years old and came to Australia with my family. The economy was really bad at the time and my parents wanted a better future for all of us, so we came here to start afresh and have a better life. I grew up in a really multi-cultural area, around Dandenong, and being different from your neighbour had never been an issue. As I got older and became a teenager, everyone was different from each other, so it was just normal.
What made you want to go into landscape architecture?
I’ve always been a creative person, and loved to draw, loved to imagine being in really cool spaces. My parents wanted me to go into something secure – like any immigrant parent – and so I settled for landscape architecture, because I thought there’d be more work in it, but still interesting at the same time.
Let’s finish with your future dream, where do you see yourself?
I want to be creative in the design of space, and be really intentional and purpose driven, because that’s just the kind of designer I am. I feel inspired everyday by something, and it comes out in everything that I design.
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Thank you Momo, and all the best for making that dream a reality, can’t wait to see what you do next!