Australia as garden

REVIEW

Gardening appears to be in the Australian DNA, with quarter acre block backyard potterers, television makeover imitators, inner city self-sufficianados and tree and sea changers alike getting into the Blunnies and turning a few sods.

In The Garden of Ideas Richard Aitken explains that Australia when first viewed through European eyes was imagined and then framed for its potential as a vast garden, a concept that is less familiar than the stories of its military, imperial and penal uses, but one that helps explain the national fascination with gardening.

“The rise of interest in nature and landscape during the eighteenth century meant Australian scenery would inevitably be scrutinised, especially for its park-making potential,” the author writes.

He explains that while earlier Dutch and English explorers Tasman and Dampier had showed little enthusiasm for their coastal sightings of Australia, the voyages of Cook “heralded a new sensibility in observations of the landscape”. Cook’s talented botanical artist Sydney Parkinson wrote in 1770 of the land bordering Botany Bay that “the country looked pleasant and fertile; and the trees, quite free from underwood, appeared like plantations in a gentleman’s park”.

The usually astute observer James Cook noted of the flats of Botany Bay “some of the finest meadows in the world”.

Eighteen years later the First Fleet looked in vain for Cook’s meadows, “smooth verdure from a distance, but in reality muddy swamps,” as the author observes.

Notwithstanding this rude and near-disastrous shock ”favourable allusions continued to be drawn over the ensuing half century or more between the English landscape garden and the Australian landscape, which was perceived as a natural park”.

The Garden of Ideas traces this “emparking the Australian” through a series of conceptually bold and deftly executed sections with telling sub-chapter headings such as “Improvers on the loose” unfolding the story of the first government-sponsored developments in the new colonies.

The pattern continues through the 19th century of colonial modernism, botanical and horticultural virtuosity and planning for scenic effect, again punctuated with pithy sub-chapter headings such as “Villa, power and privilege” which analyses the rise of new villa estates on the first suburbs of Wolloomooloo in Sydney and New Town in Hobart.

“Cities, gardens, and beauty” records the transformation from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries; “Modernism, functionalism, and naturalism” takes the reader to mid-century and the blooming of Australian-plant gardens up to the present of “So many gardens, so little time” with the imperative and aesthetic of sustainability.

The Garden of Ideas is embellished with an unparalleled array of images – paintings, drawings, prints, plans and photographs – each richly evocative of their time and most never previously published. Unearthed from around Australia, and many from overseas, these images carry the story of Australian garden style down the years, in the process criss-crossing social and cultural history across the wide extremes of our continent.

Richard Aitken, whose book Botanical Riches was published in 2006 to popular and critical acclaim, brings a lifetime of experience to The Garden of Ideas. He achieves fresh insights and presents our passion for garden-making with wit and flair.

The Garden of Ideas is a valuable source book for the sophisticated gardener and an indispensable companion for the garden lover.

Richard Aitken is a Melbourne-based architect, historian, curator and poeticist. His books include The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (2002), Gardenesque (2004), Botanical Riches (2006), and Seeds of Change (2006). He has also contributed chapters to The Art of the Collection (2007), showcasing landscape paintings of the State Library of Victoria, and Reframing Darwin (2009), published to accompany exhibitions at the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library and The Ian Potter Museum of Art. He has been in private practice since 1978 and has prepared conservation plans for many of Australia’s most significant historic gardens, including the botanic gardens of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. In 2006 he was awarded honorary life membership of the National Trust of Australia for his advocacy role in the identification and conservation of significant gardens and designed landscapes. He is currently co-editor of Australian Garden History (quarterly journal of the Australian Garden History Society) as well as researching the history of Australian garden styles for The University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.

The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style by Richard Aitken (Miegunyah Press 2010 RRP 64.99)