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A visit to Ick Chu’s phantasmagorical garden in Sunshine West is like falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland.
There’s a tiger riding on the head of a life-sized concrete elephant, a gargantuan pumpkin, a menagerie of topiary animals, a bear, an apricot coloured stag and two dinosaurs that have invaded the nature strip.
Self-taught topiarist Ick Chu in his Sunshine West front yard.Credit: Chris Hopkins
The front yard has become a tourist attraction; visitors pull out their phones and 76-year-old Chu – who is often out the front pruning – invites them to wander around and explore.
“You have done a magnificent job – you could charge people,” said one sightseer.
Chu, a self-taught topiarist who migrated from Laos in 1978, was inspired by a holiday in Thailand, where plant sculptures are a popular feature in public and private gardens.
“I do it because I love it,” he says.
Ick Chu’s “hallucinatory garden” is a wonderful example for us all to enjoy, says artist David Wadelton.Credit: Chris Hopkins
He is regularly offered money for his creations but demurs, insisting it’s just a hobby.
“On the weekend, quite a lot of people come,” Chu says. “They love it; they bring the kids.”
Artist and “wandering amateur archivist” David Wadelton says Chu’s “hallucinatory garden … is a wonderful example for us all to enjoy and for the ambitious to emulate”.
It’s one of almost 100 to feature in his latest photobook, Front Yard – the final in a trilogy that also includes Suburban Baroque (2019) and Small Business (2021) and documents poignant slices of suburbia.
Wadelton spent 12 years trawling the suburbs – Reservoir and St Albans in particular proved gold mines – to celebrate the hard work of those who go above and beyond in their pursuit of a notable front yard.
“I reject the Bunnings bird baths and angels and nymphs and all those sorts of things,” he says.
“I am especially attracted to what I would call a heroic front yard, where someone has crafted it themselves and they’ve really put a high level of effort into it and maybe it highlights their particular skills.”
There’s the sunken No. 12 tram in Northcote and the four-metre replica of Michelangelo’s 16th-century sculpture David in Caroline Springs – updated, Wadelton quips, with a six-pack physique.
There’s a pair of topiary birds having a cuppa and a snooze in Bundoora – “it’s such a feel-good thing to see”.
The Tootgarook “Parthenon”.Credit: David Wadelton
And a Parthenon-style temple in Tootgarook on the Mornington Peninsula – Wadelton got a tip-off that “it belongs to the parents of a well-known music identity”.
One of his favourites is a fountain in Reservoir with three life-size mosaic dolphins and a shell-encrusted base. “It’s just an incredible work of love,” he says. “You have to see it to believe it.”
Vito Di Benedetto says his father, Ignazio, a retired plasterer who still lives in the Reservoir home, built the fountain from scratch in the late 1960s.
He enlisted his children to collect shells from St Kilda beach, made the dolphins’ serrated teeth from the tips of Selleys No More Gaps tubes and installed a motor to eject water from the dolphins’ mouths.
A life-size dolphin fountain in Reservoir.Credit: David Wadelton
Ignazio, a private man, refused a request to use the front yard as a set for the film Wog Boy.
As a child Vito was sometimes self-conscious about having such a conspicuous front yard, but he now marvels at his father’s creativity. “The way he constructed the fountain himself was quite amazing.”
Wadelton, who uses crowd-funding campaigns to underwrite his books, says urban densification and gentrification threaten the existence of the suburban ephemera he photographs. Front Yard, he says, will record them for posterity.
Sure enough, when The Age accompanies Wadelton to Fairfield, we discover that a fountain with two ice-blue gallivanting horses featured in the book has been replaced by a swimming pool.
Instead, he takes us to Clifton Hill, where beribboned naked female statues flank the gate of the home of Gracie Addamo. One of the statues was beheaded by a passerby and Addamo replaced it with the head of a Cabbage Patch Kids doll.
Addamo, who regularly changes the ribbons on the statues, says children stop and admire her front yard, which is populated with statues of dwarfs and angels and an exquisitely manicured apricot tree.
“They call it a fairy garden,” she says.
Photographer David Wadelton and Gracie Addamo at her Clifton Hill home.Credit: Justin McManus
Wadelton is as attached to the smaller, quirkier features in front yards – the heart carved into a Northcote lawn, the swan pot plant holder in Eaglehawk – as he is to those that make a big statement.
“It’s just something that looks like the owner of the house marches to a different drum somehow – they have decided to do something different. The eccentricity of it attracts me.”
Front Yard is set to be published next year by M.33.
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