If I didn’t know already, it would have been impossible to tell from the inside of the Yarra Bend Park that I was only a short drive from the urban centre of Melbourne — the rustle of the eucalyptus leaves in the wind drowned out any of the noise that might have carried from the Melbourne suburbs.

Visiting on a weekday morning, it seemed as though we had the entire park to ourselves, and getting away from the carpark and picnic area to follow one of the walking trails, we shed the built environment almost entirely; the only clues that we were in a park were the wood & wire fences, the supports encircling eucalyptus saplings and the wide gravel trail we walked on.

The gravel gave way partway through the walk to a narrower dirt path following along the river. In places, the spreading trees created a canopy over where we walked — it was in these spots, where I could reach out and touch the trees, where I could see the undersides of the branches and the birds nests that had been made there, that I truly felt like I was inside the landscape and not just a traveller passing through it.

This was the first site that we visited, and I was incredibly aware of the uniqueness of the landscape, partly because we were there to observe the environment and how it made us feel, but also partly because it was my first time surrounded by Victorian native plants (having moved from Western Australia to urban Melbourne in February). I’ve spent a lot of time in the Western Australian bush, but I felt as if I’d stepped into an entirely different world here: other than the gum trees, nearly all of the flora was different; the way the light shone through the gaps in tree cover to illuminate the plants was different; the greens were more blue; the ground under my feet was dark brown dirt and not red and littered with rocks.

Initially, I was kind of disappointed by the environment — there weren’t a wide range of colours, and I couldn’t see too many different plants — but as I walked through, I became more aware of how the plants had an incredible variety of textures, from the burnt tree trunks to spiky leaves to the fluffiness of the ground covering shrubs; I just wasn’t looking for those things in the landscape. I suppose that’s my aesthetic preferences showing through, but it makes me wonder how much of that preference is really nature (haha!) and how much is nurture, growing up in a society where a beautiful space is a particular kind of intentionally cultivated.