In an interesting twist, the Australian design projects featured were not identified at the time of submitting the initial grant proposal. It was only after the filming of the Japanese projects in November 2022, that we identified the Australian projects. With our minds deep in Japan, dominant framings of Australian landscape architecture (urban, infrastructural, nation building, climate change) were dislodged, and we looked to projects that engaged more intensely with ideas of temporality, experience, inhabitation, planting, questions of publicness and materiality. Japan allowed us to see the familiar with fresh eyes. This is one of the major values of cross-cultural research.