Growing Australian Landscapes_use and Meanings of Native Plants

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Growing Australian landscapes: the use and meanings of native plants in

gardens in twentieth-century AustraliaKatie Holmes

Version of record first published: 09 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Katie Holmes (2011): Growing Australian landscapes: the use and meanings of native plants in gardens in twentieth-century Australia, Studies in

the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly, 31:2, 121-130

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Growing Australian landscapes: the use and meanings of native plantsin gardens in twentieth-century Australia

kat ie hol m e s

In 1903 Charles Bogue-Luffman, the Principal of Australias first Horticultural

College, Burnley, opined about the Australian flora and its lack of suitability for

the garden: we suffer here from a lack of fine natural shapes, and graceful

combinations in nature. Thereis, indeed, little of a soul-stirring and invigorating

kind.1 One hundred years later Australians were being encouraged to go

native in their gardens, to use this cultivated place to express something

uniquely Australian.2 In the century that separated such diverse attitudes,

much was said and written about the use of native Australian plants in the

garden. This article examines the kinds of meanings attached to native plants,

and considers what they can tell us about attitudes to both the Australian

landscape and ideas about national character and identity.

The Federation of Australia in 1901 left white Australians with a dual status.

Gone were their numerous colonial identities; they were now both subjects of

the British crown, and citizens of Australia. Aboriginal Australians, believed atthe time to be a dying race, were not eligible for citizenship. How was this dual

status of British subject and Australian citizen cultivated in, and through, the

garden? I suggest here that the distinction made by many Australians between

the garden and the bush provided a way for white Australians to negotiate their

understanding of national identities. Although garden writers and horticultur-

alists enthused about the garden as a reflection of national pride, horticultural

practice, did not match that rhetoric. This conflict between aspiration and

practice as it developed over the twentieth century is central to the problem

this article addresses. And central to that conflict, I suggest, is a very clear

demarcation between bush and garden, and the negotiation of a dominant

garden aesthetic, which viewed native plants as wild and, like the Aborigines

who were also called natives, as unknown, untamed and unpredictable. The

trajectory towards the growing use of native plants in Australian urban gardens

was complex. There was no linear process that saw the eventual establishment of

all-native gardens; rather, we see an accommodation of native plants and designs

alongside exotic species, and a changing attitude toward the Australian bush

whereby it became more familiar and tame, even a place to be replicated in the

garden.

Interwar attitudes towards Australian native plants

In many parts of Australia during the nineteenth century, native plants were

frequently used in the garden because they were accessible, even if not a greatdeal was known about their cultivation. As exotics became more readily avail-

able, the use of native plants diminished. And while some garden writers and

native plant enthusiasts continued to advocate their value in the garden, by the

early twentieth century certain commentators such as Bogue-Luffman with

whom I opened this article, were struggling to find anything in the surrounding

landscape worth salvaging for the garden. In contrast, two years earlier John

Watson began planting an all-native garden in the Melbourne suburb of

Balwyn. Maranoa Gardens was not Watsons home garden but more of an

experimental site. It was opened to the public in 1919 and handed over to the

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council in 1926.3 By that stage interest in native plants had grown considerably

and many horticulturalists had begun advocating their use in the garden. In what

would become a concerted campaign to change the ways Australians saw their

landscape and in particular its native flora, the garden began to be advocated as a

place where Australians could display their national pride. Initially those who

enthused about the native flora concentrated on the wattle and the gum tree andthese became symbolic of attachment to the land. Such sentiment increased

significantly during World War I when both plants, along with the waratah,

were sent to troops far away as a reminder of the sights and smells of home.4 The

wattle and the eucalypt were distinctive, but through the adoption of them as

national symbols they also became appropriated, domesticated and tamed.

The cultivation of national sentiment through the use of native plants tookon

different imperatives in the aftermath of World War I. Wattle Day became the

occasion to extol ever more fervently the virtues of not just the wattle, but the

bright land and the bright white people who now inhabited it. The language

became more jingoistic with each passing year. In 1927, the Garden and Home

Maker of Australia declared Wattle Dayas onewhenthe heart of every Australian

should beat faster because of the power of the bright blue skies under which our

national flowering shrub andtrees, as wellas our manhood andwomanhood, are

able to work out their own great destiny . . . Golden wattle, golden fleeces,

golden grains, golden deeds, and a land of blue and glory to live in.5 This

tendency to effusiveness, which the wattle seems to have inspired, was not

restricted to the horticultural press. Jean Galbraith, who wrote under the

pseudonym Correa in the journal the Garden Lover, was a young woman living

in Victorias Gippsland region, when she wrote to her elderly friend John Inglis

Lothian about a trip to view thelocal Goldenwattles in bloom:A whole hillside

is just overflowing with exquisite gold, and when one stands beneath the treesand sees their loveliness against the sky a blue, blue sky it was the beauty of

it is enough to leave one breathless. Three days later when Jean encountered

more wattle blossom: she

just had to stop and look, over and over again at the cascades of Silver Wattle

blossom, which was deliciously wet and delicate where it kissed the water, and all

about, in fluffy golden surges was just I cant possible tell you what just

wattle blossom. You know.6

It was precisely this kind of sentiment that the advocates of wattles in particular,

but native plants more generally, hoped could be instilled amongst Australian

citizens in general: a reaction of pride, wonder and awe in the face of such

natural beauty. But it is worth observing that Galbraiths effusive reaction was to

the sight of wattles blooming in their natural environment the bush and

not in the garden.

Given the newness of theAustralian nation, it is notsurprising that a great deal

of attention in gardening literature was given to thinking about the ways thegarden could help instil in the population the kind of qualities needed for its

future citizenry. Just as Wattle Day symbolized the golden anticipation of a

happy future, so the garden would contribute materially to a better home life

which is the very foundation of a nations wealth, strength and happiness. 7 In

inter-war garden literature we find a desire to marry the British gardening

heritage with a new and emerging Australian identity.

Millie Gibson was a landscape architect and writer for the Melbourne news-

paper the Argus. Her weekly column, The Garden. Amateurs and Their Work.

Hints and Comments, established her as a highly popular garden writer.

Writing under the name Culturist, she displayed an intimate knowledge of

the gardens of suburban Melbourne, providing gardeners with information and

advice, as well as regular musings about the moral benefits of gardening. In

November 1924, she addressed the relationship between gardens and national

character:

The gardens of England bring us nearer home. Here we feel our feet tread on

familiar ground. . . . The English have the same feeling for grouping flowers, but

always with a lot of restraint, as befitting the soberness of the climate and the

people. Now we are of that race, but with a different environment, and it is surely

an interesting question to ask how our national gardening will develop. . . . The

outstanding characteristic to-day seems to be a vivid sense of colour. Likely this is

being unconsciously absorbed from the blue of our skies and the vivid hues of theAustralian native flora . . . Can it be that the national gardening here will unite the

sterling qualities of the British with the colour of Italy? 8

Millie Gibson herself promoted the use of native plants, believing they had

practical qualities to offerthe gardener: They had early flowering habits,9 anda

predominanceof vivid bloom in the spring. We do notrealize allthe possibilities

of our native plants, which, including the acacias alone, give a wide range. 10

Gibsons attention was to the look, the show of the plants, the way they fitted

within the inherited visual idea of what a garden should look like. Wattles

conformed particularly well in this regard. They had good shape and vivid

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colour. Occasionally Gibson was more precise: Eugenias, or Acmenas (Lilly

Pilly), as they are frequently called, may be included among our most valuable

plants.11 These were the native equivalents of the garden worthies.

Significantly, the Lilly Pilly could be used as a hedging plant, and both varieties

responded well to pruning and shaping. But Gibson also revealed her own bias:

We often hear the complaint that with a few exceptions Australian shrubs have

not got much beauty of form. In the main this may be admitted; but while such

plants as Eugenias are well known, two good shrubs, Baloghia lucida and Macadamia

ternifolia, are not often seen in gardens. Both are catalogued by most of the

nurserymen and are easily obtainable.

Perhaps the reason they were not often seen in gardens was that their relatively

large size makes them unsuitable for many suburban gardens, and neither do

they grow particularly well in Melbourne. Gibsons horticultural expertise did

not lie in native plants. In this she was not alone. But what is revealing is that not

only was she unfamiliar in a practical way with the plants she advocated but she

adopted the view that most native Australian shrubs lacked beauty of form.

One of the key problems for many gardeners and horticulturalists alike was (and

in many ways still remains) the dominance of the European aesthetic in the

garden, the reiteration of pictorial or picturesque structuring. Inheritors of

what John Dixon Hunt describes as an uneasy legacy of pictorial taste,

Australian gardeners, especially those living in the southern states of Australia,

found it difficult to integrate native plants into their visions of what a garden

should look like.12

The plants that did fit with that legacy of pictorial taste, and which also drew

on memoryand association,were primarilyexotics:The dahliais so gorgeous in

colour and so valuable for garden display and cut flowers during the autumn that

no garden should be without some,13 enthused Gibson. Lilies were another

favourite: the Madonna lily is one of the easiest grown, and is to be found in

almost every cottage garden in England.14 It was the ultimate endorsement.

The influences on Gibsons own taste are readily apparent. She bemoaned the

absence of much gardening literature dealing with Australian conditions, and in

its place recommended the writings of Gertrude Jekyll (18431932), that enthu-

siastic advocate of natural gardens, to her readers as the standard works.15

When it came to shrubs, Gibson passed on the advice of William Robinson

(18381935), the well-known English landscape gardener: Forsythia

Suspense [sic] is certainly one of our finest shrubs and should be found in

every garden, however small.16 The similarity of this shrub with some wattles

is readily apparent and helps us understand the readiness with which the wattle

itself was embraced.

The use of England as the measure of good taste in gardening reflected the

dominance of the idea of English gardens, as well as the emotional connection

many Australians still felt toward the centre of the Empire. Jean Galbraith, thewattle enthusiast and avid promoter of the use of native plants, captured this

sense: It was inevitable that we, gardeners all and lovers of the England we had

never seen should long to plant such a hedge.17 The very idea of an English

garden, while rarely seen in situ, was the powerful determinant in shaping how a

garden should look. Of the eucalypt Galbraith noted that, One can understand

their absence from the city they could have no place in trim suburban

gardens, where beds and borders toss their blossom to the edges of the lawns.

In the country though, they should be valued.18 The country garden could be

expansive enough to include such trees, where their shape and colour could

even be featured and valued. In fact, Galbraiths own integration of native plants

with exotics allowed her to create a very different vision of a garden than was

common. In the orchard, she planted evergreens alongside the fruit-bearing

trees, intermingling natives with more familiar plants. That may be why this

garden is in no way separate from the valley. It is a flower of the same soil as the

bush and the grass paddocks are, and seems to recognise its kinship with them.19

Few horticulturalists promoted the use of native plants in the inter-war

garden as eloquently as Jean Galbraith. In this she was aided by the Field

Naturalists Society, of which she was a member. Each year the Society held

an annual wildflower show, in which they sought to display the variety and

beauty of native plants, and to encourage the growing of them in suburban

gardens. The show was usually opened by a local dignitary who made appro-priate comments about the beauty of the exhibits and endorsed the activities of

the Society. In 1925, the Minister for Railways, Mr Eggleston, called on the

Field Naturalists to help in the stimulation of an Australian sentiment by

educating Australians about their native flora.20 While he did not specify just

what an Australian sentiment entailed, we can be confident it involved taking

patriotic pride in Australias natural environment and that knowledge about

native plants would assist in its development.

Many horticultural writers did extol the uniqueness and beauty of Australian

wildflowers, and the variety and colour to be found in the native flora, and

encouraged their planting in home gardens. But a different prevailing practice is

t h e u s e an d mean i n gs o f n at i ve plan t s i n gar d en s i n t wen t i et h - cen t u r y au s t r ali a

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suggested by the way the same journals that periodically suggested particular

plants to try, were more typically filled with detailed discussions on the growing

of exotics, especially roses, sweet peas, chrysanthemums, carnations, daffodils

and dahlias. Horticulturalists knew comparatively little about the cultivation of

Australian natives, and this lack of knowledge is reflected in the pages of

gardening magazines. Information for the gardener wanting to know whichnative plants to grow and how to grow them was difficult to find. Gardeners

were encouraged to incorporate native plants in their gardens alongside culti-

vated species, in a gesture seen to at least acknowledge the land of their citizen-

ship. But in inter-war Australia, gardens were not generally seen as needing to

reflect national pride. Even the horticulturalists who encouraged gardeners to

grow more native plants were reluctant to relinquish space reserved for the

enduring favourites of the garden. As C. B. Frond put it in Australian Home

Beautiful, I prophecy that the Australian flora will win more garden territory;

that the list of cultivated species will lengthen . . . One may be a lover of the

natives without lessening the devotion to the aristocrats of the garden, as roses,

dahlias and rhododendrons.21 My suspicion, however, is that a Mr

W. R. Warner from Camberwell expressed more accurately the sentiments of

most home gardeners in his 1926 contribution to the Garden Lover: he was going

to mention some trees suitable for the garden, but warned he would name very

few natives, for we wish surely to break the monotony of the bush as far as

possible. My head is as good as off, I know, but with the majority of good

Australians I love the Gums and Wattles, but then we can have too much of a

good thing.22

In this articulation, the bush is the place where ones sense of identification

with the Australian nation could be expressed, but the garden should be left for a

different kind of aesthetic, and perhaps a different kind of association.

Rendering the bush monotonous is a profoundly visual condemnation and

carries strong echoes of earlier nineteenth century responses to the landscape,

such as that of Katie Hume, a recently arrived immigrant from

Buckinghamshire, England, who when she first travelled across Queenslands

Darling Downs in 1866 bemoaned the look of the gum trees: the foliage is most

disappointing. It hardly deserves the name. The leaves are narrow & grey-

looking & hang down so as to afford no shade they are called Evergreens

but never green wd be more appropriate.23 As we have seen, amongst

Australian-born residents such sentiment had changed significantly by the

inter-war years, at least towards eucalypts, but there were still important

qualifications. In 1929, the Garden and Home Maker of Australia put it this way:

while we love the flowers of our garden for their well-ordered stateliness, their

regularity of shape, their size, and diversity of colour, we yet feel a different love

for those plants that grow in our bushland, be they ever so ragged in growth and

disorderly in appearance, for to us they seem to be part of our homeland. 24

There is an important distinction here between what the garden should express predominantly an English gardening heritage and what was appropriate

for the bush. We can see reflected here the dual status of Australian citizen and

British subject; perhaps white Australians felt no conflict between the Australian

and British parts of their identity: this duality was reflected in their reported

response to plants bush flora affirmed their Australianness and their British

heritage bloomed in the garden.

One of the key issues here seems to be aesthetics. Native plants were ragged

and disorderly, they lacked beauty of form, were monotonous and did not

conform to the standards set by exotics. In order to understand this more fully,

we need to appreciate the sensory nature of the garden, for the experienceof the

garden is central to our appreciation of it: the look, but also the smell, the touch,the sound, the taste.25 Native plants were a challenge on many of these fronts:

their colours were different, as were their growing habits, the way they felt and

smelt, and even tasted. And while English gardeners took some pride in being

able to grow Australian plants in their hot houses or their gardens, where their

exoticness was a desirable feature, in Australia the differenceof native plants was

much more easily acknowledged, appreciated and experienced in the bush,

removed from the intimate daily interactions encountered in the garden. Just

as the bushman and the pastoral lifestyle became embraced as distinctly

Australian and reflective of national character, and yet was not something the

majority of urban dwelling Australians ever experienced, so the wonder of

native plants was safest kept at a distance. They could be encountered on bush

walks, or perhaps in the botanic gardens, or at the annual wildflower show, and

the odd specimen might find its way into suburbia, but the garden did not need

to be a place where pride of country was reflected, that was something best

projected onto a place far removed from the home garden.

A slight shift in this attitude began to occur in the 1930s when growing native

plants increasingly became encouraged as an expression of nationalist sentiment.

There were several strands to this: a perceived need to save the native wild-

flowers from extinction and thus use the garden as a kind of sheltered environ-

ment in which to nurture wild flowers; the idea that the garden could improve


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on nature and thus make native plants more acceptable; and a shift in attitudes

toward the landscape, whereby it might be embraced and incorporated into the

garden, rather than feared and excluded.

In the 1920s, concerns about the possible extinction of many species of wild-

flowers prompted many horticulturalists and botanists to act to save this heritage

worth preserving.26 There had earlier been voices expressing concern about thedisappearance of wildflowers, such as a 1904 writer in the Amateur Gardenerwho

foresaw that Australia was replicating problems then evident in England: there is

nothing more certain than a flowerless Australia . . . The Native Rose and

Waratah are small items in themselves, but they are part and parcel of a native

flora which every man, woman, and child should be compelled to respect.27 By

the 1920s, many voices had been added to the call to save Australias wildflowers.

Australians first had to recognize that the native flora was worth preserving,

something in which they could take pride. It was time, the Garden Magazine

opined to its readers in 1923, to commence being proud of your countrys

wonderful flora, before its too late.28 When it came to the destruction of the

flora itself, the greatest transgressor was the motorist (code also for modernity)

who travelledinto the bush, collectedcar-loads of wildflowers for ornamentation,

and returned to the city. As in other parts of the world, numerous people began

agitating for legislationto protect wildflowers, andgardenjournals promoted their

planting as a preservation exercise. Are not we, as a people, sadly neglecting a

most important feature of our work that breathes the very essence of our natural

sentiment, and voices the bewitching freedom characteristic of the bushso dear to

the hearts of all true Australians?29 In the Australian context, wildflowers were

seen as the countrys natural heritage, something that, unlike the nation itself,

was very old, a heritage that the country could be proud of unlike the convict

stain, as it was then perceived, or the countrys rich Aboriginal history, which

could barely be acknowledged. Australias botanical heritage was unique, distinc-

tive, and in danger of disappearing. It was the countrys great national trust, the

childrens birthright that can never be replaced.30

Extracting the beauty from the bush and planting it in the garden gave a new

legitimacy and priority to the growing of native plants. The Garden and Home

Maker of Australia decreed in 1930: That the public takes an interest in growing

native plants is essential, particularly in view of the rapid extinction of many. 31

In this context, the garden was intended to provide a safe haven for wildflowers,

and gardeners were deemed to be performing a patriotic duty in planting them.

By 1937, Aussie Gardener, a nom de plume unthinkable even ten years earlier,

suggested that the garden could provide a more hospitable environment for

native plants than the bleak winds and rough conditions into which Dame

Nature has so ruthlessly thrust them.32 The garden improved nature, domes-

ticating the wildness of the Australian landscape. A key to the successful

promotion of native plants was their domestication: they had to be safe,

accessible, and able to fit within the dominant visual aesthetic. They couldeven respond to civilizing activity. The Argus reported in 1929 that, contrary to

popular understanding, fertilizers could be used on native plants. As a result, the

displays of native flowers at the Melbourne Botanic gardens were noticeably

superior to the same flowers sourced from the bush. The difference was the

liberal application of bone dust fertilizer that the plants received in September.33

It is clear in inter-war discussions about the use of native plants, that their

visual aesthetic was a difficult one for white Australian gardeners to accept,

accustomed as they were still to English concepts of taste. Regular comments

about their scraggly growing habits, untidiness and wildness, remind us that the

experience most people would have had of native plants was limited to that

which they encountered on their ventures into the bush or even the beach,

where plants were wild and by definition often ragged and unstructured, and

thus unsuited to the ordered backyards of suburban Australia.

In the inter-war period, gardening literature was literature, with a few black

and white visual reproductions that struggled to engage any senses. Garden

magazines were intended to support and guide actual activity in the garden, as

opposed to replacing it. Garden plans were used to convey layout, with some

particularly artistic ones, such as those by Edna Walling, also managing to be

works of art in themselves. Without access to visual images that could convey

the delicacy, colours and variety of native plants, the experience that many

people would have had of them was limited to that which they encountered on

their ventures into the bush, or even the beach, where plants were wild and by

definition often ragged and unstructured. Without the knowledge of where and

how to look, the smaller, more delicate plants, which were appropriate for the

garden, could pass unnoticed. Educating people about the value and beauty of

the native flora was essential to both saving it for future generations, and

encouraging people to use it in their gardens.34 When Lord Somers, the

Governor of Victoria, opened the Wildflower Show in 1927 he commented

with surprise at how little people knew about the native plants in their area: It is

a strange thing that people go about with their eyes shut among such natural

wonders as abound in this land.35


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The campaign to save wildflowers from extinction, and thereby legitimate

their use in the garden, might also be recognized as an adoption of visually

suitable plants, or plants that could be suitably introduced into the garden. The

language of taming the wild is important here and carries echoes of the

assimilation policies directed toward Indigenous people whereby Aboriginal

children of mixed descent could be removed from their families and placed ingovernment- or church-run missions. The thinking behind such policies was

determined by ideas about breeding out the colour, or a belief in the inevitable

decline of the Aboriginal race; if you bred out what was feared, the hope was

that you would also dilute the way of life, the untamed behaviours. If native

people could becivilized, so too native plants could be redeemed for and in the

garden.

Given the repeated exhortation for people to garden with native plants, we can

assume that most white Australian gardeners were slow on the uptake. One

popular inter-war garden designer, Olive Mellor, observed in 1938 that only

twice in her twenty years or so of practice, has she been asked to design a native

garden.36 Edna Walling, one of the most well-known garden designers of the

1920sto 1960s, had herown epiphanyabout native plantsat some point in thelate

1930s. In July 1938, she wrote in her regular Letters to Garden Lovers column

about a native garden she was designing, this will be a lovely native garden, and

once and for all let us hope it will help to lay [to rest] the ghost that frightens

people and makes them look so depressed when one mentions native plants. You

really cannot wonder. Take the border of Australian plants in the Botanic

Gardens. Could anything be more uninspiring?37 Is the ghost of the native

plant an uncanny allusion perhaps to the ghost of the Aborigine, stalking the

landscape? Wallings image evokes the idea of t he Australian gardener pursued by

the spectre of dispossession, a whispering that the garden making of the respect-

able citizen may not be so benign after all. Her reference to the border of

Australian plants reminds us again of the importance of the aesthetic appeal

or lack of it when it came to native plants, and how even trained horticultur-

alists struggled to use native plants in a way that was visually appealing to them.

In inter-war Australia, it seems that no matter how ardently horticulturalists

and garden writers might promote the use of native plants in the garden, White

Australians did not necessarily see that space as one where their identity as

Australian citizens needed to be expressed. The dahlia along with the rose,

the carnation and chrysanthemum remained dominant. They were enduring

embodiments of the British Empire in the Australian garden.

Post-war attitudes

After World War II, ideas about the garden began to change, albeit slowly.Garden writers might encourage gardeners to use more native plants in their

garden, but did not refrain from disparaging comment about their inadequacies.

ReginaldEdwards, in The Australian Garden Book (1950),for example,encouraged

gardeners not to have their blocks c leared of all trees when building their homes,

then proceeded to observe that native trees and shrubs were not so colourful and

beautiful as many imported kinds, and throw much less shade, but they should

not be despised, for they are very hardy and with a little care and attention can be

converted into specimens of lasting utility and decoration. But his 316 page book

devotes just six and a half pages to native flowers. A more notable shift in attitudes

toward native plants began to happen with the publication of several significant

books by women writers, namely Edna Wallings The Australian Roadside(1952),

and Thistle Harriss Australian Plants for the Garden (1953).38 In 1957, the New

South Wales-based Thistle Harris and the Victorian botanist Arthur Swaby

founded the Society for Growing Australian Plants, which helped to disseminate

knowledge about the cultivation of native plants.

In post-war Australia, the encouragement to grow native plants was framed less

as a patriotic dutyand moreas an expressionof national identity, their suitabilityto

the environment and as a measure towards their preservation. Thistle Harris

believed that the majority of exotic plants were ill-suited to the Australian

climate, and she wanted to publicize the versatility of the Australian flora. Pre-

war concerns about t he threat posed to Australias unique botanical heritage were

compounded, post-war, by expanding suburban development. In the 1950s and

1960s, calls to grow more native plants frequently echoed earlier fears that White

settlement threatened thosesame plants withextinction.The Society for Growing

Native Plants took as its motto Preservations through Cultivation, and sought to

cultivate, improve and preserve Australian flora in both the garden and the

bush.39 The Society played a significant role in educating the public about native

plants and their possible use in gardens.There wereother suchgroups withsimilar

motivations. The Beaumaris Tree Preservation Society, from the Melbourne


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bay-side suburb of Beaumaris, sought to raise awareness of the areas unique

heathland flora. The Society claimed that whereas early immigrants to Australia

had planted the deciduous trees of Europe because they were familiar with them,

it is now generally realised that native trees have a beauty of their own that is

unique and an adaptation to soil and climate that others have not. Many of them

are becoming domesticated, happy in cultivation.40

While some of the languagewith which the use of native plants was promoted had changed, the need to tame

their wildness remained. In 1965, Hugh Elliot wrote of the shy bush plants,

which needed some persuading to accept civilised living.41 It is difficult not to

draw comparisons with contemporary attitudes towards the Aboriginal popula-

tion. Sociologist Nick Smith argues that in Australia, the indigenous population

and the nature to which it is allegedly so close have consistently functioned as

Other to a settler sense of self.42 While I agree that at times the meaningsgiven to

the term native might be seen to be interchangeable for either plants or people,

settler Australians identified themselves with native plants and chose these as an

expression of patriotic feeling in ways that has proved consistently and appro-

priately inconceivable with the Indigenous population.43

The most significant shift in the understanding of how native plants might be

used in the garden came in 1966 with the publication of Betty Malony and Jean

Walkers Designing Australian Bush Gardens. Outside a few forward-thinking

projects such as Castlecrag and Eltham,44 here was a radical rethinking of the

garden aesthetic then dominant in Australia, a step away from the familiar lawn

and garden plot and the fighting against nature it demanded. Walker and

Malony sought to embrace the bush, the most distinctive feature of the

Australian landscape. They hoped that their designs would be adopted both by

those wanting to preserve the bush around them as well as those wanting to start

a bush garden from scratch. The design should create a garden in very close

harmony with the Australian bush, or a particular section of it. Tall eucalypts,

lots of ground cover, banksias, grevilleas, acacias, ferns, etc; this was bush very

reminiscent of that surrounding Sydneys northern and coastal suburbs, and

beyond. The bush garden was to be maintenance free, no weeding . . . no

lawnmowing. It is above all an Australian way, in harmony with our own very

wonderful environment.45 The garden was to reflect the characteristics of the

Australian lifestyle: relaxed, easy going, and confident of its relationship with the

surrounding landscape. Dont fight against nature: eliminate the lawns and let a

soft, restful carpet of fallen leaves and bark eliminate your weeding for you. This

is the first stage in carefree gardening.46

This reinvention of the bush as a benign and tranquil place was captured even

more strongly in Walker and Molonys second book, More About Bush Gardens:

Let us look again with humility and understanding. Our flowers are modest;

they do not swagger. Look now and be endeared by their gentleness, their wild

charm and untamed loveliness.47 Both the garden and the bush were being

reinvented here.48

No longerthreatening and foreign, native plants are renderedalmost childlike, their wildness now seen as charming and endearing. When the

bush became garden, it also became familiarized. It became a landscape to be

embraced rather than one which by its nature excluded. The raggedness and

untidiness of native plants were now qualities to be celebrated, for these were

the features that ensured the all important carefree gardening.49

It is significant that it was the bush garden that represented this Australian way

of life. In their book Unknown Nation, Curran and Ward argue that from the

mid-1960s, with a dwindling material basis for imperial sentiment, Australians

were confronted with the task of remaking their nation in the wake of empire.

The search was on for alternative ideas, symbols and practices that could express

the new nationalism emerging across the nation.50 For the advocates of native

plants, and many other artists, politicians, and cultural commentators, it was the

Australian landscape that represented the most distinctive aspect of the

Australian experience. The bush garden could replicate something of that

landscape, reflective as it was of a certain rare feeling of national self-respect

current in Australia in the 1960s.51 Alistair Knox, a Melbourne designer who

became famous for his championing of mud brick as a building material,

embraced the bush garden as appropriately Australian, believing that [t]inder

dry bark, fallen leaves and the scent of the bush in the vertical rhythm of the

eucalypts is written into the heart and inner being of every genuine

Australian.52 As Kylie Mirmohamadis article in this issue demonstrates, resi-

dents of the Melbourne suburb of Eltham, where Knox was best known, as well

as particular suburbs along Sydneys north-shore, welcomed the idea of the bush

garden; it was a coming of age for Australian gardening, an adaptation of both

Japanese and British gardening traditions using local plants and natural resources.

In general, the style of the bush garden had limited appeal. Perhaps the

aesthetic was too different, the sensory appeal still more readily embraced in

the bush itself rather than the garden. But the practice of growing native plants

in the garden was slowly on the rise and the idea of a distinctly home-grown

style of garden was more enduring. When the Canberra Botanic Gardens finally

opened in 1970 (from 1978, the National Botanic Gardens), for the Australian


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Womens Weekly itsdelays since thefirstofficialplantings in 1949 were a blessing

in disguise. It gave the notion of a wholly Australian garden time to take hold.

There was a new climate of nationalism, a search for identity. Now the concept

seemed so palpably right.53

While relatively few Australians took to bush gardens or all-native gardens,

many more began growing natives in their gardens, planting them alongsideexotics in a more familiar reflection of the garden of their gardening heritage. It

is beyond the scope of this article to consider in detail more recent arguments

used to promote the use of native plants. But, broadly speaking, by the 1980s

general gardening books routinely included a chapter on native plants as well as

one on lawns, and an increasing number of books devoted to gardening with

natives began to be published. While the idea of native gardens as low main-

tenance was still important, other features became increasingly significant. Geoff

Rigbys The Australian Gardeners Guide to Native Plants (1982) argued that the

native garden will be aesthetically more in tune with its environment than

introduced flora can ever achieve. The gardens attractiveness to birds was

evidence of its greater harmony with the surrounding environment.54

In the early 1990s when Diane Snape, a vocal practitioner and advocate of

gardening with native plants, published her Australian Native Gardens: Putting

Visions into Practice, a number of the gardeners she interviewed articulated a

strong sense of nationalism as a motivating factor for their native gardens. I

dont want to be too nationalistic, observed Tim Woodburn, but we should be

proud to be Australian, and theres a great future for Australian plants. Bruce

Champion was even more forceful: We have a native garden because of

nationalism. Britain is not our home; were Australian and proud of being

Australian, and we know that there are so many lovely Australian plants that

we can grow.55 For many gardeners, however, arguments based on nationalism

and patriotism remained as unconvincing in the 1990s as they had in the 1930s.

While knowledge about how to cultivate native plants increased significantly,

and hybridization introduced a range of new and attractive varieties, garden

centres continued to sell exotics in far greater numbers than native plants.

The drought conditions affecting much of south eastern Australian since the

late 1990s introduced an alternative argument into the call to garden with

natives. With water restrictions in force and some areas restricted to hand

watering with buckets only, or even no use of water outside, many exotics

proved themselves to be unable to withstand the prolonged lack of water. A

garden of dead and dying plants, after all, holds little aesthetic appeal. In this

context, and amid growing fears about the impact of climate change, native

plants have been promoted as the obvious alternative, and as more suited to the

prevailing climatic conditions. They fit in, are more at home, and natural.56

Advocatesof indigenous gardens, namelythose would argue forthe useof plants

from the immediate, local area, have also used the opportunity provided by the

drought conditions to promote their vision of the garden. Indigenous plants arealso credited with the power to restore the landscape to its natural, pre-invasion,

state.57 Environmental sustainability has been the new argument used to endorse

both the native and indigenous garden. Such arguments received a battering,

however, in the wake of Victorias Black Saturday fires in 2009. Native plants,

their detractors argued, were more susceptible to fire and placed homes at

greater risk then exotic species whose green canopy could provide greater

protection from a raging blaze.

Conclusion

For the century or more that garden writers and horticulturalists in Australiahave been encouraging Australians to grow more native plants in their gardens,

the call has increased in intensity with the passing of each decade. The reasons

given as to why Australian gardeners should so cultivate the native flora has

changed, but the ongoing presence of such encouragement alerts us to an

inescapable fact: Australian gardeners themselves have not been very keen on

going native in their gardens, and they have proved strikingly resistant to the

barrage of arguments advanced as to why their garden aesthetic should change.

In particular, calls to use the garden to reflect ideas about Australian national

identity or character have had little sway, although gardening books will

frequently discuss the need for the garden to incorporate the outdoor lifestyle

many Australians enjoy. When designer Jim Fogarty was selected to take his

award winning Australian Inspiration garden to the Chelsea Flower Show, he

observed: This is not an Australian native garden. It is, nevertheless, a typical

Australian garden. A true blue Australian garden with an eclectic blend of plants,

indigenous and exotic, brought together in an informal and relaxed way.58

There is recognition here of thediversity of Australian gardeningculture andthe

mixture of international influences that have now shaped it, and a repetition of

Walker and Moloneys idea that the garden should reflect the easy-going

character of the Australian people. Some garden writers would still seek to

have the garden express something of the surrounding landscape and national


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identity. In reviewing the Bryants Encyclopaedia of Australian Native Plants

(2005), Karen Ingram observed that despite the problems of coping with

eucalypts [in the garden], theyre a beautiful symbol of life in a sunburnt

country. And as Bryant writes: Nothing says Australia as powerfully as a

white-branched ghost gum in red desert soil set against the blue sky. 59 The

unruly, messy eucalypts will continue to cause the gardener headaches, but theyare worth enduring for meanings this quintessentially Anglo-Australian tree

brings to any garden.60

To drive or walk around the suburbs of Australias southern cities today it is

clear that the European garden aesthetic still dominates. Some all-native gardens

are visible, and many more gardens use native plants alongside exotics in ways

that gesture toward accommodation and incorporation. In these instances, the

aesthetic is still predominantly European, with plants selected for their colour or

form, rather than any attempt to develop a distinctive Australian style or to

reflect the surrounding landscape. Other gardening traditions will also

be encountered, reminding us that the Australian population is a highly

multicultural one, and thus we should expect a diverse range of gardening styles

to be represented.61

Perhaps not surprisingly, it has been the realities of drought and the ravages of

climate change that in recent years have forced more Australians to rethink their

gardening culture and aesthetic. We can see the environment, landscape and

gardens moving closer together and reshaping the look and meaning of this atonce both intimate andpublic space of thegarden, a space which continuesto be

invested with powerful personal, cultural and political meanings. As this article

goes to press, it seems that the drought that has afflicted south-eastern Australia

forthe last tenyearshas finally anddramitically brokenand that once again

there is water for the garden. It will be interesting to observe if the changes

witnessed over the last decade hold sway, or whether, as our native garden

advocates would hope, the increasing incorporation of native plants in garden is

here to grow.

La Trobe University

n o t es

1. Charles Luffman, Principles of Australian Gardening

(Melbourne: The Book Lovers Library, 1903),

p. 20.

2. Anonymous, Going Native. Very Bestof Gardens and

Outdoor Living Garden Design, i, 2003, quoted in

David Trigger, Jane Mulcock, Andrea Gaynor and

Yuan Toussaint, Ecological restoration, cultural pre-ferences and the negotiation of nativeness in

Australia, Geoforum, xxxix, 2008, p. 1276.

3. National Trust Statement of Cultural Heritage

Significance. http://www.nattrust.com.au/trust_reg-

ister/search_the_register/maranoa_gardens_and_-

beckett_park. Maranoa Gardens is still an all native

Australian Garden and open daily to the public.

4. See John Foster, Natives in the Nineteenth Century

Garden, Australian Garden History, ii/4, January and

February 1991, pp. 35. See also Libby Robin,

Nationalising Nature: Wattle Days in Australia,

Journal of Australian Studies, lxxvii, March 2002,

pp. 1326; and Kylie Mirmohamadi in this issue.

5. Garden and Home Maker of Australia (1 August 1927),

p. 16.

6. Jean Galbraith to John Inglis Lothian, 14 August

1927, State Library of Victoria [SLV], Manuscripts

Collection, MS 12637, Box 3462/6.7. Harold C. K. Stephens, Beautiful Surroundings an

Essential to the Modern Home. Hornsby and Ku-

Ring-Gai Shires Advocate(24 August 1928), p. 12.

8. Argus (7 November 1924), p. 16.

9. Argus (31 October 1924), p. 16.

10. Argus (21 August 1925), p. 16.

11. Argus (1 May 1925), p. 4.

12. John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of

Garden Theory (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000),

p. 128.

13. Argus (28 November 1924), p. 16.

14. Argus (2 January 1925), p. 3.

15. Argus (14 November 1924), p. 16.

16. Argus (24 July 1925), p. 17.

17. Jean Galbraith, Garden in a Valley, 1939 (Hawthorn:

The Five Mile Press, 1985), p. 59.

18. Australian Garden Lover(1 May 1927), p. 62.

19. Ibid., p. 96.20. Argus (23 September 1925), p. 25.

21. Australian Home Beautiful (June 1930), p. 37.

22. Garden Lover(1 January 1926), p. 338.

23. Nancy Bonin (ed.), Katie Hume on the Darling Downs:

A Colonial Marriage: Letters of a Colonial Lady

(Toowomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1984),

p. 14.

24. Garden and Home Maker of Australia (1 February 1929),

p. 208.

25. Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections, p. 128.

26. Garden and the Home(1 November, 1923), p. 28.


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27. Amateur Gardener(1 November 1904), p. 4.

28. Garden Magazine(1 August 1923), p. 9.

29. Garden and the Home(1 November, 1923), p. 28.

30. Garden Magazine(July 1924), p. 17.

31. Garden and Home Maker of Australia (1 March 1930),

p. 240.

32. Garden Lover(November 1937), p. 31.33. Argus (28 September 1929), p. 12.

34. Elise M. Cornish, Her Garden, in Louise Brown,

(eds), A Book of South Australia: Women in the First

HundredYears (Adelaide: Rigby Limited,1936),p. 165.

35. Argus (28 September 1927), p. 20.

36. Australian Home Beautiful (1938), p. 81.

37. Edna Walling, Letters to Garden Lovers 19371948

(Sydney: New Holland, 2000), p. 61.

38. Edna Walling, The Australian Roadside (Melbourne:

Oxford University Press, 1952); Thistle Harris,

Australian Plants for the Garden (Sydney: Angus &

Robertson, 1953).

39. John Walter, Society for Growing Native Plants inRichard Aitken and Michael Looker (eds), Oxford

Companion to Australian Gardens (Melbourne:

Oxford University Press, 2002).

40. More About Native Plants and Seaside Gardens

(Melbourne: Beaumaris Tree Preservation Society,

1956), p. 2.

41. Hugh Elliot Rearing those Shy Bush Plants, Sun

Herald(23 January 1965), p. 14.

42. Nick Smith, Nature, Native and Nation in the

Australian Imaginary (PhD thesis: La Trobe

University, 2000), p. 5.

43. This is not to suggest that representations of

Aboriginal people, their artwork and other forms

of cultural production have not been used as a

short-hand for representations of aspects ofAustralia.

44. See Mirmohamadis article in this issue.

45. Betty Maloney and Jean Walker, Designing Australian

Bush Gardens (Sydney: Reed, 1st edition 1966, 1978),

pp. 910.

46. Ibid.

47. Jean Walker and Betty Moloney, More About Bush

Gardens, 1967, edited by Barbara Mullins (North

Sydney: Horwitz Publications, (1967) 1969).

48. Trimble, The Garden in Australia, p. 16.

49. The promotion of native gardens as low maintenance

was previously advocated by the Beaumaris Tree

PreservationSociety in 1956 whowroteof our desirefor minimum maintenance requirements.

50. James Curran and Stuart Ward, Unknown Nation:

Australia after Empire (Carlton: Melbourne

University Press, 2010), p. 5.

51. The quote is from Robert Drew, cited in Curran and

Ward, p. 62.

52. Alistair Knox, Living in the Environment (Canterbury,

Victoria: Mullaya Publications, 1975), p. 60.

53. Kay Keavney, Canberras Botanic Gardens: Where

city folk stroll in an ancient land. Australian Womens

Weekly (9 December 1970), p. 24.

54. Geoff Rigby, The Australian Gardeners Guide to

Native Plants (Milson Point NSW: Currawong

Press, 1982), p. 7.

55. Quote in Diana Snape, Australian Native Gardens:Putting Visions into Practice (Port Melbourne:

Lothian, 1992), pp. 118, 128.

56. For a discussion on the ways advocates of native

gardening appeal to the naturalness of native plants,

see, Trigger et al., Ecological restoration, p. 1276.

57. See Katie Holmes, Susan Martin and Kylie

Mirmohamadi, Reading the Garden: The Settlement of

Australia (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University

Press, 2008), p. 194.

58. Cliff Green with Jim Fogarty, Australian Inspiration: A

Bush Garden goes to Chelsea (South Melbourne:

Lothian books, 2004), p. 4.

59. Karen Ingram, Fascinating Flora. Canberra Times (1December 2005), p. 5.

60. For a discussion of the changing meanings of the euca-

lypt, see, Lucy Kaldor, Gum Tree, in Melissa Harper

and Richard White (eds), Symbols of Australia: Uncovering

the Stories Behind the Myths (Sydney: University of New

South Wales Press, 2010), pp. 5965.

61. See Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi, Reading the

Garden, Chapter 10.


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Growing Australian Landscapes_use and Meanings of Native Plants