REVIEW
and shuttered windows. The gardens surrounding
them evoked the genteel English Arts and Crafts
movement, with mainly white flowers and perhaps
some muted shades of pink and blue. In Melbourne,
Edna Walling, a renowned Australian garden
designer, had also developed a garden style influ-
enced by the Arts and Crafts movement. Planting
Dreams shows plans of her gardens, featuring rustic
pergolas supported by heavy columns, stone-flagged
terraces with small ponds, herbaceous borders of
muted coloured flowers and carefully framed views
of the bush.
In contrast to the different romantic gardens,
there were also modern gardens associated with the
modern movement in architecture. Modern white
houses were built by Jewish refugees from Germany
and Russia, who were starting to arrive in small
numbers by 1935, bringing with them the spirit of
the Bauhaus. The gardens associated with these
houses needed to be just as modern, with simple,
smooth lawns accented by minimal, rigid rows of
cypress pines.
Once again the Second World War interrupted
any interest in garden design, but after the war,Australia went through a significant change as a
result of the immigration project initiated to provide
the workforce for the Snowy Mountains Scheme and
other industrial enterprises. This massive immigra-
tion program, which included predominantly British
and European migrants, also influenced Australian
gardens.
Meanwhile, the mainstream Australian society of
the 1950s was going through a period of conservatism.
Suburbia was growing rapidly and in the gardens there
was a general swing to neat front lawns and small
colourful trees. Everything was to be ordered and
controlled, including highly managed horticultural
specimens. By the late 1950s, the Californian use of
patios and pools was starting to influence the design of
Australian backyards, but in general, this was not an
innovative period in garden design. Planting Dreams
reflects this with various seed catalogues associated
with this time.
In the 1960s–70s a new garden style emerged –
the bush garden. There had been glimmerings of such
gardens in the Griffins’ Castlecrag houses but it took a
number of issues to generate a wider community
interest in this garden style. In Sydney, the “green →2–3. European migrants of the 1950s
were compelled to grow their own
food on arrival to Australia. Their
gardens were characterized by edible
figs, grapevines, olives, vegetables
such as eggplants and zucchini, garlic,
chives, beans and herbs.
Photo: Helen Armstrong
- A Vietnamese topiary garden
in Brisbane. The Vietnamese, like
previous migrant groups, saw the
garden as a place to grow food and
later to explore their art of topiary.
Photo: Helen Armstrong - An “invented tradition” from
Singapore: one of nine lakes in an
Asian migrant’s garden on a bush
hillside, south of Brisbane.
Photo: Helen Armstrong
2345LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA MAY 2017 77