About

Beyond the bounds of landscape design.

Outlandish events ignite and stimulate ideas about designed landscapes and gardens.

Outlandish brings together world leading landscape designers, planting experts, ecologists, artists and other specialists from home and abroad to present their ideas at carefully curated forums, including events, travel experiences and offers specialist consultancy services to engage with you in sharing these ideas.

We recognise that when people come together to hear, share and experience truly outstanding landscapes, innovation is ignited.

Outlandish events

Outlandish curates and delivers the biennial Australian Landscape Conference (ALC), a major international event of 28 years standing all about designed landscapes.

As a premier global forum for cutting-edge discussion on landscape design, the conference has attracted the most important and influential figures in the discipline to Melbourne, resulting in the most genuinely international roster of speakers at any regular landscape conference.

Over the decades, we have fostered relationships with innovative designers, plants people, nurseries, design specialists and garden lovers across the world. The conference continues to grow, locally and globally, and elicits joy and sparks ideas through inspiration, innovation and shared experiences.

Next Conference: March 2027

Travel

Immerse yourself in outstanding landscapes with world leading designers.

Be Outlandish and dive into world leading private gardens and landscapes. Allow your feet to tread through natural areas, breathe the air of wonder as you visit cultural sites and enjoy all of this in a small group of people with whom you share interests.

Be part of a small group to join Fleur Flanery, Landscape Architect and Director of Outlandish, to visit California landscapes where we take in modernist influences and contemporary landscape designs. The designers and creators of the places we visit will join us allowing a rare insight into their creative process. This is a rare opportunity to see design brilliance in action as we walk with them through the canvasses they have created.

Next California Tour: 2026

Treading New Ground

Land Escapism events are located in different parts of Australia (they travel). The events are held biennially during the intermediate year between the Australian Landscape Conferences.

We curate a series of in depth talks and walks to inspire you along the way. You’ll spend time with remarkable landscape designers, architects, artists and writers who join us on the journey as we make time to tread new ground and explore the landscapes of the selected region.

The first of these events was held at Willinga Park, Bawley Point in February 2022.

Next Event: 2026

ALC’s first foray out of Melbourne was a great success, and hopefully gives you confidence to continue your outreach program of landscape inspiration! Being out of the city also gave the event a particularly convivial flavour I think - perhaps it has to do with all those sensible shoes and hats and the sartorial choices they enforce…

Robin Powell – Writer, Sydney Morning Herald

The Outlandish Team

Our team of specialists is renowned for going ‘above and beyond’ to deliver success.

Fleur Flanery
Director, Outlandish Ventures

Fleur Flanery has a lifelong professional and personal interest in landscapes and enthusiasm and a zest for doing things that make you feel like anything’s possible. Professionally she is a Landscape Architect with a further degree in Communication and a Diploma in Horticulture.

She has significant experience in managing public landscapes in her former roles as Executive Director of City Services and Executive Director Strategic Planning for the ACT Government. These roles included management of Canberra’s parks, open spaces, urban forest, playgrounds with regulatory responsibility for City and Domestic Animal Rangers and various roles managing Roads, Public Transport and Strategic Planning.

Her lifelong interest in landscapes and the ways in which it can express regional identity and aid biodiversity provides constant stimulation.

Margo Ngawa Neale
Director, First Nations Cultural Advisor

Margo delivered the opening address for the ALC in 2021 titled ‘Clever country: There is no nature without culture’ where she presented about ‘Land’ and its link to ‘Country’ in Aboriginal Australia. It is a worldview that embodies nature and its many manifestations through the seasons, weather events, climate and landforms. Through this presentation Margo has continued her involvement now formalised as the First Nations Cultural Advisor for Outlandish.

Margo Ngawa Neale is currently Head of the National Museum of Australia Indigenous Knowledges Curatorial Centre. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Australian National University’s Centre for Indigenous History. Margo has published widely and curated major pioneering exhibitions including the multi-award winning Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. Margo is editing the First Knowledges book series, the first of these is Future Fire, Future Farming which explores Indigenous knowledges in vital areas and their application to the present and the future.

Edwina Johnson
Ideas Curator

Edwina Johnson is an Artistic Director and Ideas Curator. She is passionate about connecting audiences with big ideas; crafting gatherings where creative minds are truly valued, which synergistically foster community through shared story. She believes in the power of ideas and interactions that can change the world.

Edwina was Director of Byron Writers Festival for eight years with previous artistic programming and curatorial roles at Sydney Writers’ Festival, Faber Writing Academy and Shakespeare & Co Festival (Paris) contributing to a 20-year-plus career immersed in the world of literature, ideas and event management. Edwina oversaw and nurtured Byron Writers Festival to its recognised status as one of Australia’s headland regional Writers’ Festivals, a favourite with authors and audiences alike.

Bronwen Jones
FRAIA

Bronwen Jones is an architect who works at the intersection of architecture and city making. She advocates for collective change to meet the critical challenges of our time.

Through her writing and by curating and leading specialist walks and events, Bronwen contributes to the broad ranging conversation about the future of urban living. In particular, she brings her considerable knowledge about the attributes required to create great public places to this conversation. She was a valued member of the ACT Government’s City Renewal team that aims to improve and activate Canberra as part of its liveable cities initiatives.

More recently, with an ever-expanding environmental awareness, Bronwen has turned her energy to the regenerative movement with the purpose of contributing to the reunion of architecture with the natural environment. She now lives in Tasmania.

Sandra Schwarz
Onsite Program Coordinator

Sandra Schwarz trained as a visual arts teacher before completing a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Melbourne and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Her work focuses predominantly on restorative gardens especially seen in her connections with Austin Health, Global Gardens of Peace, Open Gardens Victoria and most recently Therapeutic Horticulture Australia.

She also works for Andrea Proctor Landscapes and has recently written her first book about Restorative Green Space exploring universal qualities as a lens for designers, remaining curious and active within this broad field.

Bill Nixon
IT Specialist

Bill has been involved with ALC since 2015, supporting the website, performing various IT functions and photographing conferences. Following a career in the corporate world of software development and internet communications, Bill has been fortunate to find himself working in a niche where technology meets nature. He enjoys the process of bringing beautifully designed landscapes to the electronic media.

Living on a hobby farm in Victoria’s Yarra Valley has been a pleasant balance to his long hours spent in front of the computer screen cutting code.