write to him about the plants they were growing in
their gardens or on their farms. And they did. He
accumulated a vast correspondence of planting
observations. After he left in 1873, the RBG hoarded
the letters in boxes until the early 1960s, a time when
history seemed “musty and stale.” So the letters were
thrown away. Imagine what a feast of information
would have been available to Richard Aitken and his
fellow curators if the letters still existed.
Avoiding a chronological approach, the Planting
Dreams exhibition has been curated around themes
that challenge us to see unusual relationships
between plants and people. I have been exploring
such intriguing relationships for some time through
my collection of stories about migrant gardeners,
weaving together the history of Australian gardening
and the history of migration to Australia. These
garden stories show how memories and dreams,
inspired by another country, take form in this new
country. All Australian gardens, whether grand or
modest, are an intriguing mixture of influences from
other countries and a fascination with curious
Australian plants growing in such unusual settings.
Early settlers had mixed visions for the new
country. Many imagined that they were coming to an
antipodean Garden of Eden, only to be disturbed by
the reality of this large, open, flat land of strange
colours and sounds and peculiar plants and animals.
The shattering of these dreams on first arrival was
universal for convicts and settlers alike.PLANTING DREAMS: SHAPING
AUSTRALIAN GARDENS
TEXT HELEN ARMSTRONG
Planting Dreams: Shaping Australian Gardens
exhibition, 3 September 2016 – 15 January 2017,
State Library of New South Wales, curated by
Richard Aitken.REVIEW
Australian history is almost always picturesque;
indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the
chiefest novelty the country has to offer ... It does not
read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. And
all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full
of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and
contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all
true, they all happened.- Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897.^1
I
f Mark Twain saw fit to comment that Australian
history was always picturesque and the “chiefest”
novelty the country had to offer, then Richard
Aitken’s exhibition Planting Dreams: Shaping
Australian Gardens at the State Library of New South
Wales shows that, over the last five hundred years
(and across a number of different countries), there
have been many botanical dreamers who sought
to map and explain Twain’s “incongruities, and
contradictions.”
There is a curatorial elegance about this exhibi-
tion as, guided by various themes, we move
seamlessly through half a millennium, stopping to
explore a 1592 study of the natural history of Brazil, a
1599 map of Africa, Asia and the East Indies, and the
wonderful 1778 charts that Carl Linnaeus laboured
over to make sense of the world’s cornucopia of
botanical wealth. Along the way, we pass a 1956 photo
by Max Dupain of the sensuous relationship of a Peter
Muller house to the Sydney bush, an evocative
etching of native grasses by Deborah Wurrkidj from
2003 and so much more. Mark Twain would have
loved this exhibition because it is “full of surprises,
and adventures, and incongruities, and contradic-
tions, and incredibilities ...”
The richness and diversity of the displays high-
light not only the curatorial creativity, but also the
responsible stewardship of various libraries and indi-
vidual collectors. It is alarming to realize how much is
being lost in academic libraries today due to
economic rationalism. But we have a history of such
negligence. When Ferdinand von Mueller became the
director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne
(RBG) in 1857, he invited all Australian settlers to174 FEBRUARY 2017 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA