Healthy Parks = Healthy Communities

At Coolabah Turf, we don’t just grow grass, we build healthy communities - one backyard at a time.

We spend every waking second of everyday living, eating and breathing lawns and we've made it our lifelong mission to not only produce the highest quality turf varieties for our customers, but also the most sustainable lawn landscapes that encourage active and healthy lifestyles for entire communities.

A substantial backyard has long been considered part of the ‘great Australian dream’. But the reality is our backyards are shrinking.

Denser cities and urban sprawl; our busy, more sedentary lifestyles; longer working hours; improved heating and cooling; and an increase in video games and computer technology are all factors resulting in larger houses and less private outdoor space.

In many instances the local park is replacing what was once the great ‘Aussie backyard’ and the need for quality and safe public green spaces is now more crucial than ever.

According to Professor Tony Hall in his book, The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard, up until the end of the 1980s, nearly all suburban houses in Australia had (by world standards) large backyards.

Homes in older suburbs are characterised by backyards of at least 150m², and they are commonly several times this figure. The house generally covers 20-30% (maximum 40%) of the plot. Backyards generally have a useful shape and significant coverage of trees.

However in the early 1990s, there was a dramatic change in Australian suburban residential development. Blocks are smaller, houses are larger and backyards have significantly decreased.

This modern day trend poses some significant risks for the health and wellbeing of our communities by cutting back facilities for outdoor recreation around the home, especially for young children.

Due to all these factors, the role urban planners, landscape architects, landscape construction teams and local government parks and garden teams play is more critical now than ever before, in designing, constructing and maintaining public open space.

In our fast paced, modern society it is incredibly important that people have the opportunity to have valuable and safe open space where they can relax and play.

If this isn’t in the backyard, then we need to ensure there is access to quality public pockets of lush green space for everyone, so we can disconnect from our online world and reconnect with ourselves and others, face to face….not just on Facebook.

We also have a responsibility to provide and maintain quality sports fields to encourage our communities to engage, be active and to give our youth a place to feel like they belong.

Our team at Coolabah is proud to be working with a number of local councils and community groups around the state of Victoria to build and maintain community green space and promote our commitment to building healthy communities. Whether it be a sports field, a new land development, a local park or a botanical gardens.

A big part of our everyday is spent educating and inspiring urban planners, local government parks teams and landscape architects to create long term sustainable solutions for green space, not only for our generation but for our future generations.

We've been privileged to work on some amazing projects over the years and the City of Greater Bendigo Botanic Garden expansion, is a wonderful example of a progressive council making a real difference to improve the health and wellbeing of its community.

City of Greater Bendigo has set itself an aspirational vision to become, not just Australia’s, but the world's most liveable community and boy is it well on its way to achieving this!

In response to demand for high quality open space, council adopted a masterplan to significantly expand its Botanic Gardens.

We were thrilled to be involved in stage one of the project which involved increasing the gardens to two hectares in size, with over 30,000 plants and seven varieties of turf suitable for our current climate and resilient to drought.

The idea was largely inspired to ensure they have a garden not only for our current conditions but also for our future conditions and to demonstrate to the community that we can still have beautiful green spaces despite our changing climate.

We applaud the City of Greater Bendigo for its vision and hope it helps to encourage other councils to include sustainable open public spaces in their future planning.

Tomorrow we are travelling down to Cape Schanck to present the Victorian Parks and Leisure Australia (PLA) State Award for ‘Park of the Year.’

PLA is the leading association for professions in the local government parks and gardens sector and these Awards of Excellence aim to promote and encourage best industry practice and recognise outstanding achievements of individuals and teams employed in the parks and leisure industry. Our Coolabah team is incredibly proud and privileged to be supporting this initiative.

Our sponsorship of this award is testimony to how committed we are to working with our local parks teams in this space and ensuring there are sustainable open green spaces for everyone to enjoy for years to come.

Good luck to all the council parks teams who have had the foresight and vision to nominate for the awards. We look forward to seeing you all there.