REVIEW
considered to be the high point of the Australian
garden style. Wealthy pastoralists created gardens in
the picturesque rural landscape using the principles
of the English Georgian garden, shown in the
Planting Dreams exhibition through Humphry and
John Adey Repton’s 1816 illustrated theories on land-
scape gardening. Australian gardens, however, had
a different quality of light and unusual views to flat-
topped mountains and other curious things. Unlike
their English counterparts, which were character-
ized by misty views of old rustic mills beside dark
reflective water, the expansive Australian Georgian
garden, under a clear blue sky, was bleached yellow
and brown.
The period between the 1870s and the 1880s
resulted in the consolidation of wealth, from both
gold and large rural holdings. This was an interesting
period in terms of garden styles. In the cities and
towns, large urban High Victorian villas developed
that were either copied from magazines or inspired
by travel to Britain and Europe. Houses at this time
were highly decorated and their gardens followed a
new English garden style known as the gardenesque,
in which individual horticultural specimens were
given prominent positions in lawns that also featured
statues, fountains and stone balustrades. Strangely,
the urban garden style developed by middle-class
merchants in Britain was also copied on rural proper-
ties, yet the reasons for its emergence were not so
evident in Australia: more of Mark Twain’s “incon-
gruities, and contradictions.”
Perhaps more unusual Australian gardens at
this time were those responding to the sublime land-
scape settings of the mountain retreats of Mount
Macedon in Victoria, Mount Wilson in New South
Wales and Mount Lofty in the South Australian hills.
Their prospects were not of productive pastoral land-
scapes, but of powerful cliffs and dense impenetrable
forests instead. The gardens were created against a
backdrop of huge eucalypts but, nestled within these
ancient forests, were treasures of the cold-climate
Northern Hemisphere gardens, such as delicate
maples and flowering cherries.
By the 1890s there was a growing reaction
against the elaborately decorated villas associated
with the High Victorian period, especially as people
were suffering the effects of three years of a world
depression. At this time new migrant groups were
starting to arrive: a few Greeks and Italians, some
French and a large group of Germans. Most of the
European migrants went to rural areas. The French,
however, settled in Hunters Hill in Sydney, where
they developed gardens that responded to the
picturesque setting of the Lane Cove River and to the
belief that Australia was an exotic tropical paradise.
The notion of Australia as a tropical paradise, another
“beautiful lie,” influenced by the French settlements
on the South Pacific Islands, was a continuing
European perception of Australia.
By 1901, a burgeoning sense of nationalism led
to new pride in Australia and, along with the increas-
ing growth of suburbs, produced neat gardens
arranged in the Federation garden style. Although
these gardens often idealized Australian plants and
animals, the garden style was essentially a copy of
the Garden City movement of Britain. Haberfield in
Sydney was an early “garden suburb” and, until
recently, had a fine collection of Federation gardens.
Planting Dreams explores various concepts for
Australian Garden Cities, including the evocative
illustrations by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion
Mahony Griffin.
The “Wartime Dreams” theme evokes the patri-
otic atmosphere of the First World War food-growing
gardens. The period between the wars was an
interesting one for Australian gardens, which were
affected by major social and economic changes,
including the changing role of women and the ways
Australian cities were being altered. The suburbs
were growing and, although the Federation period
had pioneered new Garden City suburban layouts, it
was the real estate speculation between the wars that
resulted in the extensive suburban development of
bungalows on individual blocks of land.
Garden styles during this period were diverse
and tended to reflect the dreams of individual home-
owners, but they also resulted from the different
settings in Australian cities. Sydney, Melbourne,
Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth all developed garden
styles related to the character of these cities. Sydney,
as an example, developed a range of different types of
garden. The owners of gardens on the rich soils of the
Upper North Shore often favoured Tudor houses and
gardens, planting predominantly English deciduous
trees and cold-climate azaleas and other rhododen-
drons. In contrast, gardens around Sydney Harbour
often reflected Mediterranean influences, whether
from the Mediterranean itself or from the Californian
Spanish Mission style. Such gardens had paved terraces
suggestive of Hollywood luxury and Californian
languor, including colonnaded walks and walls with
intricate insets supporting bougainvillea and potted
geraniums.
There was also an interest in returning to the
Australian colonial style. Some houses were built to
look like long, low, colonial villas, with deep verandahs76 MAY 2017 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA