Richard Aitken AUSTRALIAN GARDEN HISTORY JOURNAL OF THE AUSTRALIAN GARDEN HISTORY SOCIETY PulMishccl liy lliu Aiistraliun Garden History Society Incorporated ISSN 1033-3673 Vol 5 No 5 March/April 1994 Editorial Tliis issue of Australian Garden History’ comprises papers given at the 1993 national conference of the Australian Garden History Society. The conference, hosted by the Tasmanian Branch, was entitled ‘Cottage Gardens and Vil¬ lages’. The printed papers commence with Margaret Scott’s addre.ss for die opening of the exhibition ‘From Village to Vase - The Art of the Cottage Garden’, a display at the Tas¬ manian Museum and Art Gallery' which was organised in conjunction with the AGHS conference. British guest Ethne Clarke provides the backbone of the issue with her keynote address ‘The English Cottage Garden'. This paper is complemented by the two remaining contributions. The first, by Kim Fletcher, looks at the use of herbs, a key hor¬ ticultural and botanic aspect of cottage gardens. The second paper is by Peter Cuffley and here he briefly exam¬ ines the Australian cottage garden and draws on the English background provided by our keynote speaker. The conference was a resounding success - intellectual¬ ly, socially and financially. We hope that the selection of papers presented in this .special issue revive pleasant mem¬ ories for conference delegates, and also enlighten those members who were not able to attend. Tasmanian Branch The Australian Garden History Society would like to acknowledge that the Tasmanian Branch contributed $1,000 towards the publication of tltis issue. Contributors Ethne Clarke was the keynote speaker of the Tasmanian conference. Ethne is an English garden writer who cur¬ rently lectures at the University of York and is Secretary of the Norfolk Gardens Trust. Fler books include Making a Rose Garden, The Gardens of Tuscany and English CotinUy Gardens. Peter Cuffley works as a consultant on garden conservation and design. He has published widely on Australian gardens and traditional Australian houses. Kim Fletcherhas been involved with herbs for twenty years both as a grcrwer and user, and is a specialist in herbal research and medicine. Matgaret Scott is a retired English lecturer. She lives on the Tasman Peninsular and is now a full time writer and poet. Cover: Cottage gardening traditions live on at Blaise Hamlet; see article on page 5. Branches ACr/MONARO/RIVERlNA BRANCH Mr Bruce Itngli.sh GPO Bo.\ 1630 Canberra ACT 2601 Ph: (06) 2-i7 0665 QUEENSLAND BRANCH Ms Jan Seto PO Box 459 Toowong Qlcl 4(X)6 PIv. (07) 393 3354 SOUTH AUSTRALIAN BRANCH Mr Kichard Nol an CZ-'llie Botanic Gardens of Adelaide and State Herbarium North Terrace Adelaide SA 5000 SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS/SOUTHERN NSW BRANCH Mrs Elizabeth Webster Salisbury Downs Blanket Flat Bigga NSW 2583 Ph. ((M8) 352 205 Fax (048) 352 241 SYDNEY AND NORTHERN NSW BRANCH Ian Glu.skie 13 Claremont Rd Burwood Heights NSW 2136 Ph. (02) 747 3301 Fax (02) 744 3924 TASMANIAN BRANCH Mrs Fairie Nielsen Pigeon Hill. RSD 469 Bumie Tas 7320 Ph: (004) 33 (X)77 VICTORI/\N BRANCH Ms Gini Lee d— Royal Botanic Gardens Birdwood Avenue South Yarra Vic 3141 Ph/Fax: (03) 650 5043 WEST AUSTRALIAN BRANCH Ms Anne Willox PO Box 1323 Subiaco WA 6008 Ph; (09) 381 1675 Tlie Australian Garden 1 listory Society was fomied in 1980 to bring together tho.se with an intere.st in the various aspects of garden history—horticulture, landscape design, architecture and related subjects. Its prime concern is to promote interest and research into historic gardeivs as a major component of the National E.state, It aims to lotrk at garden making in a wide hi.storic, literary, arti.stic and scientific context. The editorial content of articles, or the products and services advertised in this journal, do nol necessarily imply their endorsement by the Au.siralian Garden History Srxiely. Cl LAIRMAN Margaret Darling TREASURER Robin Lewame SECRETARY Lester Tropman JOURNAL EDITOR Da\'id Beaver 4 Dewrang Avenue Elanora Heights, NSW 2101 Ph/Fax (02) 913 3528 Correspondence should be addressed to the Secretary, AGHS, C/- Royal Botanic Gardens, Birdwood Avenue, South Yarra, Victoria 3141. Ph/Fax (03) 650 5043. 2 Peter Cripps From Viiiage to Vase Exhibition Opening Address Cxardening, historical research and painting have long been three of my principal interests. Here at the Tasmanian Alt Gallery and Museum, in Fnnn Village to Vase — The An of the Cottage Garden, the three are brought into an elegant synthesis. These drawings and paintings give us a fresh insight into the histoiy^ of Australian gardens. They also show how the art of the painter or sketcher can com¬ plement and, in a sense, preseiw the ait of the gardener, and beyond this, they point up the affinities between gar¬ dening and painting or drawing. As Amanda Beresford remarks in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue: Gardeners do with growing things what artists do, at least some of the time, with their medium, be it paint, water¬ colour, pastel or pencil; tninsfomi and enhance the viewer's perception tanicallv inspired art works at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery spring up and sprawl all over the place. The general effect is, to say the lea.st, haphazard. The gardens and fiower arrangements on the walls here are not like that. They are, it seems, as their owners wished them to be. There are no snails, no aphids. The petals of the blossoms are not gnawed by earwigs. But then, these picnires are, after all, a celebration of achievement. Most, like the gardens they represent, are cjuite modest in size and .scope - unpretentious, affectionate, meticulous works, but celebra¬ tions nonetheless. It is this - the celebration of achiev'ement - that forms the dominant theme of the exhibition. You can see it very clearly in the second of the five sec¬ tions into which the pictures have been divided - the group entitled ‘The Early Colony - Fences and Borders’. Fences, good, strong, straight, new fences, are, as the title of the .section suggests, much in evidence - much more so than in the first section ‘Precursors - English Villages and Gardens’, where, apart from the wall shown in Barrington’s watercolour of Hampton Court, enclosing barriers are either absent or falling over. I’m not saying that Engli.sh, as opposed to Tasmanian gardens, needed no protection. I could hardly imagine that, since, when I was about eleven, I left our back garden gate open and went out for a drive with my parents. When we came home there was a cow looking over the frcrnt hedge and, soon it was discov'ered, a whole herd laying waste the back garden. The point I want to make here has nothing to do with the terrible scene that followed. It is concerned instead with the hedge in which that guiltily yawning gate was .set. This was a hawlhorn hedge with elm trees rising from it, something very common at that time in rural areas of southern England, .something which seemed to have been there always, a natural, unremarkable element in the landscape. But in Australia, in the early years of European settlement, there were, of course, no hedges of this or any other kind. Any barrier needed, say, to keep the cows out of the veg¬ etable garden, had to be made and imposed on the land. The neat, straight fence that Simpkin.son de Wesselow shows us from his hilltop in ‘O’Briens’ bridge on the Derwent, Van Diemen’s Land 1847’, or the fence that Henry Gritten .seems detemiined to bring to our notice in his painting of New Town Road, are in themselves achievements, the results of long hard digging, sawing and hammering. They are also, of course, important in denot¬ ing ownership, the achievement of claiming one’s own slice of what was then seen as terra nullius, and, so it must have seemed, tlie achievement of establishing an oiitj^ost of civilisation in a howling wilderne.ss. That, at lea.st, is how one .settler, John Dunmore Lang, a churchman and parliamentarian from New South Wales, viewed the fenced areas that he saw as he sailed up the Denvent to Hobart in 1835: All is wild and waste save where the hand Of man, with long-continued toil and care Has won a little spot of blooming land From the vast cheerless fore.st here and there This kind of celebration of achievement continues in the central section of the exhibition, ‘Cottages and their Gardens’, where we see a range of Australian hou.ses, now 3 Richard Aitken with more firmly established gardens, evoking a more settled fondness. There are not many big names represent¬ ed here. There are Margaret Preston, Simpkinson de Wes- selow and a few other notable artists, but many of the painters are not well known or even outstandingly accom¬ plished. Many are amateurs like .Miss Palmer, who has painted her father’s parsonage, or Philip Hoskin Cell, the surveyor, who made the tiny study of ‘Streanshall’. But, for all that, the artists’ attachment to tlie hou.ses and gardens they depict, their celebration of homes - often their own or friends’ - that they found memorable or dear, engages us. They say, it seems, A home has been achieved here, and a garden where I like to be’. Rather strangely, the painting gets much bolder once the focus becomes more limited. Some of the strongest, most imaginative work belongs to the fourth section, ’Bringing the Garden Inside’, where the flowers, once picked, take on a fierce life of their own. In this they are veiy different from, say, J Burdon's ’Tasmanian Wildflowers and Land¬ scape’. In Burdon’s painting, as in much of the final section, ’Gardening the Wilderness’, the tichievement cele¬ brated seems to consist of taming the wild, rather than evoking the wildness in the domesticated. Burden ‘tames’ the bush by collecting and arranging an assttnment of Ta.s- manian wildflowers so that they can all be known, named and catalogued. The landscape, meantime, is kept in the distance, reduced to a rather lumpy, smudgy version of the picturesque. And while most of the other vistas in ‘Garden¬ ing the Wilderness’ are far from lumpy or smudgy, this same theme runs through them - the celebration of con- tiuest over the wilderness by turning it into a backdrop, a charming scene to be viewed from a cultivated space where there are people, constructions and, of course, gardens. In the.se gardens the painter might sit and, with the gardener, civilise the wilderness by using it to create an ordered composition. On occasions like this. I often ti 7 to discover what other significant events have taken place on the date in ciue.stion. October 15 is reputedly the birthday of the Roman poet, Virgil, and the day on which, in 1783, a Frenchman called de Rozier made the first manned ascent in a balloon. It is also the date on which the young Queen Victoria proptrsed to Prince Albert, forced to take the initiativ'e since the young prince could not presume to suggest marriage to the Queen of Kngland. Victoria, it is said, considered Albert ‘beautiful’, admiring his ’delicate moustachios’ and ‘e.xciuisite nose'. Fired by these attractions, she set modesty aside and spoke. 'Hie paintings and drawings in this exhi¬ bition, made for the most part by Victoria’s loyal subjects, remind us how Australian gardenei’s, thrust like the Queen into unfamiliar circumstances, pressed on undeterred. In doing this they became the possessttrs of their own ver¬ sions of the beautiful, the delicate and the ext|uisite, and, wedded to their gardens, delighted, as Victoria did, in the achievement of a special happine.ss. It is this achievement which we see celebrated in From Village to Vase: We An of the Cottage Garden. Maigaret Scott 4 The English Cottage Garden T he En^li.sli eollajie jjarden is a elearly defined slyle recognised by garden designers and landscape architects all over the world. But what the cottage garden has become is very dilTerent from how it began. Contrary to po|mlar conceptions, the cc^ttage garden has not evoh'ed from the gardens of medieval niral peasantry. This group were the marginalised members of society at that time. They lived in rudimentaiy dwellings, typically little more than mud and thatch shelters, and often were as much of a commodity as the land they worked - buy an acre and get a pea.sant in the price. They rarely owned any land outright. The true origins of the cottage garden are found further up the .social ladder. The ‘husbandmen’, or small holding farmers and the skilled craftsmen and the artisans within the rtiral community v\’ere the ‘cottagers’ and their gardens were the precur.sors of what became recognised as the cottage garden. 'Fhese relatively prosperous freemen were able to build more substantial dwellings, usually a house and barn. More often than not, they owned the land on which it .stood. To set their holdings apart from the common lot, the boundaries were demarcated with some form of fence or hedge, thus creating an enclosure where the wife - for early gartlening was woman’s work — raised ‘wortes’ to feed the family, ‘mangels' for the livestock, and flowers and herbs for ‘physick’. Probably the sole consideration when planting was function - ev'etything had to have a purpose - ;md little thcjught was given to fomi. Throughout the Elizabethan period there was a gradual improvement in j^rosperity, and the more substantial farmers increased their wealth and with it their social standing, until many were on a par with the land-owning gentry. Prosperity and .stability encouraged berth groups to improve their living conditions, and from the middle of the sixteenth centuty, garden design, riding on the back of architecture, became an art, and gardener a job description. Tulips, hyacinths, anemones, crown imperials, lilac and mock orange arrived from the East where the gardens of the Ottoman Empire had reached a level of sophistication far beyond anything known in England During this period the ornamental garden appeared. Flowers and herbs were grown for their decorative beauty in elaborate knot gardens, emblematic patterns worked in box hedging or decked out with polychromed railings and fanciful carv'ed figures. At Cranborne Mtinor and at Hatfield House there are knot gardens typical of the I’jeriod, recon¬ structed by Lady Salisbury who has done much to further our understanding of early gardens. A maze forms part of the design of the knot garden in front of the Elizabethan banqueting hall at Hatfield. Here the box-edged knots are filled with plants of the period, esjjecially those introduced by the Trade.scants who worked for the Cecil family. A collagegan/eii in ihe uvsl of HugUiml, iUttslmled in XX'illicnn Robinson sV.nglish I'lower Garden (2ndcd, 1889) Books like the Gardener's Labytinlb provided Uidy Salis- i:)Uty’ with historic examples. It was published in 1577 and illustrations included beds with board edging and the pergola. Vegetables were consigned to a separate kitchen garden and fruit orchards were planted nearby. One of the earliest practical gardening books is Ibe Country House-wife’s Garden written by William Hiw.son and publLshed in 1617. Lawson aimed his book at the cottager’s wife. She was responsible for everything in the garden save the orchard, which was her hii.sband’s domain. Ltiw.son set out the aes¬ thetic reason for dividing vegetables and flowers when he wrote: herbs are of two .sorts, and therefore it is meet, that we have two Gardens; a garden for flowers and a Kitchin garden; C3r a Sirrnrner garden; nrjl that we mean so perfect a distinction, that we mean the Garden for fkrwer's should or can be withoirt herbs good for the Kitchin, or the Kitchin- garden should want flowers, nor on the contraty; liut for the most I'rart they would be sev'ered; first, becairse your Garden-flowers shall sirffer .some disgrace, if among them you intermingle Onions, Parsnips Kc. Secondly, your Garden that is durable, mu.st be of one form: but that which is your Kitchins use, mu.st yield daily Roots, or other herbs, and suffer defc^rmity. Thirdly, the herbs of both will not be both alike ready, at one time, either for gathering, or removing. In this u.seful little book, Lawson also included patterns for several sorts of knots and :i plan for a maze. Trellis- work and topiaiy were extremely popular as well, so it is safe to surmi.se that the cottage wife grew her flowers, things like marigolds, hollyhocks, sweet williams, lilies, 5 peonies, pinks, roses and columbines, in small formal beds, which probably were raised above the true level of the soil - to help improve drainage - the height retained by edging boards. Quite sensibly, herbs would have been stationed near the door, and there would have been sepa¬ rate areas for flowers and faiit th;it were grown for ‘stilling’ and preserving, strewing and physic. In 1629 , John Parkinson’s Paraclisi in Sole, Pamdisiis Terresths was published. This vvras essentially a herbal describing the various practical u.ses to which each of the plants could be put — function remtiined a consideration - and giving the common names and also illustrating any naturally occurring variations in plants that would have been especially interesting to keen gardeners as the variety of plant materi'al at that time was .so limited. Hut Parkinson also described the plants arriving from the New World. Such plants vv^ere too e.xpen.sive for the common cottager but provided a challenge for the horticultural skills of the better off who could afford such luxuries. From the Americas came marigolds and sunflowers, maize and potatoes, new strains of carrot (the greenery was worn as an ornament) and runner beans which were first grown as ornamental flowers only. Tulips, hyacinths, anemones, crown imperials, lilac and mock orange arrived from the East where the gtirdens of the Ottoman Empire had reached a lev'el of sophistication far beyond anything known in England. Individual nursery¬ men received recognition, Parkinson praised Master Ralph Tuggie of Westminster who specialised in carnations and auriculas. The Tradescants, who provided plants for James 1 and the Cecils at Hatfield House, were responsible for many New World intrcjcluctions, and had a notable nursery at Lambeth. There were other fine nurseries at York and Oxford, and in Wales and Shropshire. In 1667 , John Worlidge wrote in his Systema HoiUcultiir- cie, ‘scarce a cottage in most of the southern parts of England, but hath its proportional garden, so great a delight do most men take in it'. during the eighteenth centiiiy, as the upper classes increasingly turned their gardening aspirations to landscape and design, the florists’ skills remained the prime focus of cottage gardeners The term ‘cottager’ now embraced the farm worker as well as the farm owner and ornamental gardening was a practice common to both. The arrival of French and Flemish refugees in the mid sixteenth century had intro¬ duced English gardeners from all walks of life to some new' plants and improved methods of cultivation. At about this time the term ‘florist’ came into use to signify .someone who was adept ;it growing flowers specifically for perfec¬ tion of form. The refinements c:)f hoiticultural practice encouraged the spread of florists’ societies and the number of florists’ flowers, so that by the closing years of the .seventeenth century, the aristocracy, landed gentry, and town profes¬ sionals and country cottagers alike v'ied within their social groups to produce the finest 'florists tlow'ers' :ind carry off the prizes at 'floral feasts’. Hut during the eighteenth century, as the upper cla.sses increasingly turned their gardening aspirations to landscape and design, the florists’ skills remained the prime focus of cottage gardeners. It was timong this group that the move¬ ment really took hold, promoted by the appearance of popular horticultural journals. In 1848 the journal Collage Gardener WAS first published. I lorticultural societies began to be formed - the Norfolk and Ncmvich being one of the first in 1829 — and as they grew in number and size, special classes were .set aside for ‘cottager’s’ exhibitions, the organisers of which hoping most earnestly that the competitions would help to lift them out of 'the degrading habits of sluggish |:)auperism'. Cottagers were held in pretty low esteem by their social peers, it would seem. As I mentioned before, at the .same time as florist .soci¬ eties were reaching their a.scendancy, the fashion for ‘land- skip’ vv'as coming in, led by William Kent and Capability Hrown. This trend had mixed effects on the cottage dweller. In their schemes to improve on ntiture by .structur¬ ing the natural landscape to suit some image of an arcatli- an idyll, certain large landowners not only altered the course of riv'ers and strii^ped hillsides of ancient woodland, but al.so closed roads and razed villages and cottages, thereby displacing the population. Hovv'ever, there were others who took a more enterpris¬ ing course and created model villages to enhance the effect of ‘nature improv'ed’. In the early years of the landscape movement, identical cottage dwellings with a small parcel of land w'ere arranged on a linear i")!;!!! - architecture was slow to drop its formality and follow in the informal foot¬ steps of the landscape movement. New Houghton in Norfolk is one of the earlie.st exam¬ ples of this kind of inorganic village. The landowner, Robert Walpole, built two perfectly .symmetrical rows of identical cottages lining the approach road to his park gates. Each pair of cottages is separated from its neighbour by a small ytird with outhouses :it the btick. In the.se small enclosures the cottagers could, and still do, grow' v'egeta- bles, herbs and flowers, with vaiy'ing degrees of success. Capability Hrown and William Chambers designed Milton Abbas in Dorset, with cotkiges of vaiying forms, but formally aligned along a gently sloping street. Hut such building schemes vv'hile enhancing the visual condition of the settlement, did little to improve the living conditions of the cottage dwellers; at Milton Abbas each cottage was for four families, two up, two down, Gtirdening provisions for this .sort of den.se housing would have been slight if they exi.sted at all. In the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, with the publication of Sir Uvedale Price’s book, Ati Essay on the Picturesque, and the landscape design and architectural .schemes of Humphrey Repton and later John Nash, a more natural and random placement of cottages, each possessed of its own design, c:tme to be fav'oured. Humphrey Repton's earlie.st example is Gt Livermere near Huiy St Edmunds in Suffolk, where he proposed that instead of knocking down the existing cottages, the inhabi- 6 Cottages at Blaise llawlel showing their gnniphig amtitul a centra! lawn evoking thefeeling of a village given, n rough an arrangement with the National Trust this delightful village is oJk’H to the public although the entrance is sufficiently difficult to locate that most resident are seldom troubled by sigbtseeis tants be encouraged to tidy up their jratch and install uniform wooden palings and, ‘by attention to the neatness of the front garden, make a picturesque scene’. He even saw room for improvement at his own cottage at Hare Street in Essex. As ii selling aid for his practice, Repton pre¬ pared a Red book, showing the before and after effects of his tidying-up proposals. The armless beggars and villagers are kept at a distance by a dense hedge and sides of meat in the butcher’s window are screened by a carefully placed plant triperd. The fine.st example of a picture.sque model village is Blaise Hamlet, the village of Blaise Castle near Bristol, where Humphrey Repton and later his son worked with John Nash to create a seemingly random grouping of cot¬ tages, each with different shapes and aspects, none facing onto its neighbour, supposedly to discourage gossiping over the front gate. The gardens were ncjt exclusive to each irroperty, but were meant, to give an overall effect of a village green with cottages opening onto it. In tho.se ancient villages that survived the improving hand of the landscairer and architect, the traditional formats were preserved. The best examples of generic English country cottages were said to be those in the county of Hampshire. True cottage gardens were said to follow two basic types of plan. The first, like the.se estate cottages at Great 'i’ew in O.xford, had the cottage .set back from the roatl by only a shallow front garden which was .screened by a boundary hedge, usually quickthorn. There would be a few traditional cottage Bowers filling the narrow space, and choice plants grew in window boxes or pots on the windowsills. I’he second form had the cottage set well back from the road, with a central path leading to the front door. This was bordered by narrow flower beds with vegetables grown in neat rows in beds behind each bolder — enough vegetables were grown to feed the family, their chickens and house pig - the livestock providing muck for the garden and protein in the family diet. There would have been either Bower beds under the windows or window- boxes. There might have been a yew arbor shading a wooden seat, and vine and honeysuckle were typically trained against the walls and over pergolas as in this garden in cottage-rich Hampshire. However, such idyllic rural dwellings were not the norm, and poverty, ignorance and sc|ualor were the lot of many cottage dwellers. Myles Burkett Foster was one of the earli¬ est cottage garden painters and had a seminal effect on the public perception of cottage gardens. Foster was known for the trutli of liis poitraytils. Rows of odoriferous cab¬ bages and tumbledown outhou.ses were common. During the mid nineteenth century, scenes like this were all too common in the countryside and began to prick the con¬ sciences of the upper and middle da.sses and fed a bur¬ geoning philanthropic movement detlicated to improving the lot of the niral poor. At the forefront of this movement was John Claudius Loudon whose Gardener's Magazine, started in 1826, pro¬ moted every kind of gardening. His campaigning encour- 7 licharcl Aitken aged landlords to take their tenants in hand and provide them with plants and know how, dispensed most often by the estate’s head gardener who frecjuently had charge of the cottagers' gardens, to make their gardens profitable and uplifting; it was not pure altmism that motivated the land¬ lords, and there w;is a highly moralistic and patronising tone to their charity. Loudon's opinions were widely respected and he was one of the earliest promoters of the return to the 'ancient .style of geometric gardening’ allied with a .style of planting Loudon christened ‘gardenescjue’ - the arrangement of exotic plants in an orderly garden scheme so that each plant was dis¬ played in its peri'ection. This ultimately matured into carpet bedding, which was all the rage with the gardening cogno.scenti at the height of the Victorian period. By I860, Queen Victoria was half way through her reign. Empire with a capital 'E' was transcendent, and trickle down prosperity had raised the ctrttage garden to its zenith. But, from that point onward, the lot of the cottage dweller began a downward spiral due to industrialisation and the accompanying population shift from airal agrarian to urban factory worker. Cottages and gtirdens fell derelict and among many of tho.se traditional cottages that remained in relative prosperi¬ ty, the bedding craze began to manifest itself, as cottagers began to aspire to the, as they perceived it, sophisticated example of their gardening peers. Malf-hardy plants, arriv¬ ing from the far reaches of the Empire, were planted out in rigid geometric patterns. Books were written directing gar¬ deners in the use of colour according to the principles of ‘massing’ where blocks of strongly contra.sting colour were played off one against the other. In tho.se days, colour harmony meant combining colours that were opposites in the colour spectmm, a far cry from the random deshabille of the old style cottage gardens. It was not long before the pendulum of garden fashion .swung back again. As a reaction against the grandiose fabric of the high Victorian garden, with its miles of stone balustrading, imported statuary and the extravagance of carpet bedding, the next generation of garden design pundits began to look back to the sixteenth and .seven¬ teenth centuries for their models. They were especially keen on the gardens of renaissance Italy, like the Villa Lante, and the charming intimacy of their formal plan, which was constructed with clipped box and yew hedges, arbours and pergolas. And they turned to the ‘olde worlde' cottage garden as a source of ‘authentic’ plants and planting. Parkinson’s Paradisiis oncii tigain pro¬ vided plant lists, and books were published promoting the pleasure of the old world garden. Tlie romantic ideal of the ‘old-fashioned garden’ was most strongly espoused by the architects and garden designers of the Arts and Crafts movement, established as ;i reaction again.st the industrialisation of Victorian/Edwardian England. One perspective drawing for a garden plan had pronounced echoes of Villa Lante. It was from Garden Craft Old and rVcwbyJohn Dando Sedding. Published in 1891, he .said, ‘It is a common mistake to seek rare flowers, when many of the old and most ordinary \’arieties are far metre beautiful’. He and numerous other authors clearly saw in the cottage garden a perfect allegory for simpler and more aes¬ thetic times. Nonethele.ss, their propo.sals were perceived as arguments for bedding by William Robinson who launched a fusillade of viperish criticism against the geo¬ metric formalism of the old-style garden as promoted by Sedding and Reginald Blomfield. championing in.stead his ideal, the natural garden. Robinson proclaimed that the secret of a*cottage garden's charm was its lack of ‘preten¬ tious plan' and extolled its virtues, writing, ‘among the things made by man, nerthing is prettier than an English cottage garden, and they often teach lessons that great gar¬ deners should learn'. Gertrude Jekyll finally felt compelled to arbitrate in the debate between Robinson and the new formalists, pro¬ nouncing that Robinson's natural style of gardening could do with a spot of taming by the Sedding and Blomfield’s fomial plan. She was a fonnidable practitioner of this tech¬ nique and a devotee of cottage culture. Old West Sumy is her eulogy of rural England and in it she wrote, ‘Cottage folk are great lovers of flowers and their chamiing little gardens in villages and by the roadside are some of the most delight¬ ful incidents of road-travel in our southern counties.’ Arti.sts and illustrators soon entered the lists and the ‘cottage garden' genre of English painting was created. Myles Burkitt Foster, the realist we saw etiiiier, and Helen Allingham were leading lights of the Willey, Surrey .school of cottage garden painting. ‘In a Warwickshire Byway' is by Henry John Sylvester Slannard, who painted many Cotswold scenes; an area of Gloucestershire that was the Arts and Cnift-s stronghold. His si.ster Lilian was one of the most famous and ‘A Cott:ige Garden' is typical of her work. She also illustrated many gardening books. Arthur Claude Strachen, one of the mo.st prolific; worked mo.stly in the Midlands and a well known work is ‘Girl with Dog Outside Cottage'. The.se artists and others provided highly romanticised visual images of traditional cottage gardens idealising the rural cottager’s life and circumstances at a time when the cloud of agricultural depre.ssion was just lifting. This popu¬ larisation of cottage gardening led to it becoming the fash¬ ionable style and by the 1880.S the distinction bertveen a farm labourer's cottage garden and the garden of a small country house was hard to discern. The middle cla.sses adopted the cottage .style garden, not ju.st to follow the fashion, but becau.se it also allowed them to express their aesthetic values while not putting too great a strain on finances, since it did not rec]uire the expensive, hard land¬ scaping, heated gla.sshouses and teams of gardeners which were the mainstays of more exotically planted gardens. ‘Rumwood Court’ by Helen Allingham, 'Lavington, Sussex’ by James Matthews and ‘October, Abbtrl.swood’ by Beatrice Parsons are three examples of the cottage garden come to the manor. Eventually the fusion of the informal ‘cottage garden’ .style of planting within the old-fashioned ‘formal’ plan of garden layout became accei^ted as the most tasteful garden .style by gardeners whatever their socitil standing. In 1908, E T Cook wrote in his book Gardens of England, which was illustrated by Beatrice Parsons, ‘Nothing nowadays is more characteristic as we know, of our English countryside, and there is nothing that .strikes a foreigner more forcibly, than the cottage gardens, with 8 A collategcmieii at Malliiiglcv. near Wiiichficld. Hampshiiv. illustrated in VV-7//;V/«;/*;/;/».«;;; S'English Flower Garden (2nded. 1889) tlieir aspect of homely comt’ort and even luxuiy, which everywliere fringe oiir roadsides and village lanes with broidery flowers.’ The style was adopted by garden makers like Norah Lindsay at her garden at .Sutton Cotiilney. She in turn influ¬ enced country-house garden makers like the American expatriate, Lawrence Johnston, at Hidcote Mancrr. From 1907, he created a series of hedge-enckrsed rooms, each planted to a theme like the red borders on the main axis, dotted with topiaiy, shaded by vine-covered trellis, bristling with old-fashioned roses, and countless cottage garden flowers, all ma.s.sed in bold diifts of gentle colour gradations or as single colour-themed borders. Early in her gardening life. Vita Sackville-We.st had taken advice from Norah Lindsay and had been inspired by Midcote when making Sissinghurst. The Cottage Garden and the White Garden are obviously related to the gardens at Hidcote. 'fhe.se two gtirdens are recognised as having had enormous influence bn twentieth century garden design, and were responsible for .setting the .seal of good ta.ste (tn what has come to be recergnised as the English cotttige gtirden ,st>'le. Traditional cottage gardens, where tlower borders line the path and vegetables grow in neat ixnvs, do .still exist, but cottage style gardens pof) up in all sorts of suiprising places. In France ;it Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, Con- sttince Kargere has made ti cotttige gtirden. 1 ler family has Anglo-mania, her grandfather commissioned Edwin Lutyens to build Bois des Moutiers (and another hou.se in the Cote d’Azur) and in the acre attached to her house, she has planted a .series of garden rooms, 'fhe division of the garden into separate tireas metms she can manage the garden without help, working on one area at a time. Her planting, like that of her neighbour Mark Brownis, is colour led. Mark is an English m;m who htis grafted the English certtage .style onto a French farmhou.se, relying on ,self-sown seedlings, on grasses, wildtlowers and choice garden cultivars to .soften a formal plan. Ro.semoor, the latest addition to the RHS outpo.sts, has recently opened its cotttige garden, which they describe as ‘based on a niral tradition of luxuriant, informal planting with the emphasis on colour and scented flowers. The focal point is a summerhouse built in traditional West Countiy wattle and daub over an oak frame. A glorious mixture (5f classical cottage garden plants pr(j\ ides colour and interest throughout the year tind there is also a wide ninge of vegetables and fruit including old varieties of West countr>' apples.’ Ferhaps the most unusual sighting of a cotttige garden is the one founrl at Highgrove. The Frince of Wales has made a garden of mtiny parts, including ;t cottage garden area. It is .screened from the mttin pan of the garden by a castellated yew hedge. HRH asked Rosemary' Verey to design :i garden with winding paths and llcrwers to be at their be.st throughout the .summer. This homey pan of the gtirden lies between the formtil Thyme walk and the swim¬ ming pool. Arbours mark the entrance and exit to the garden, there are rustic work seats, and a profusion of pale-cokjured cottage flowers. So the cottage garden has come of age, finding its place in the garden schemes :tnd affections of gardeners all over the world. Hlhne Clarke 9 Herbs in the Cottage Garden Herbs were prirl and parcel of everyone's life lonji l)efore people started showing an interest in gardening as such. From earliest times herbs wildcrafted from the sur¬ rounding countiyside were used for food, flavouring, cloth¬ ing, medicine, perfume, a protection against evil, a way of communicating with the gods and spirits in which people believed and much more. They were an integral part of people’s e.xi.stence at all levels of the social scale, so it is not surprising to find that they became an integral part of the cottage garden as it developed from the humble sur¬ vival garden to the more skillfully cultivated gardens of later years which focussed on beauty rather than utility. But while herbs have always been an important part of the cottage garden, their role in that garden changed signifi¬ cantly down the centuries. While cottage gardens progressed from the disorganised survival gardens of late medieval times to the more stmctured gardens of the seventeenth century and later, the role of herbs in the cottage garden remained largely unchanged for much of that time until the stabilising of the political situation and rising standard of living changed social conditions The early cottager was someone with very little leisure time to worr>' about establishing a garden apart from the very basics he needed to sur\nve. He was struggling to eke out an existence for him.self and his family on a small plot of land just large enough for vegetables, some livestock - a few chickens or a pig - maybe a fniit tree and of course some herbs. Some herbs such as yarrow, meadowsweet and thyme grew naturally around his hou.se, others he would have transplanted from further afield. It is doubtful whether there would have Ireen much rhyme nor reason to the planting as he wouldn’t have had much time for creative gardening. His garden would have been quite disorderly with a small area kept for cultivating reliable cultivated vegetables such as cabbages and leeks and the rest in effect a wild garden where herbs, flowers, wild berries freely intermingled. Most of what the cottager grew, he grew for a purpose - if what he grew had flowers which were attractive so much the better - but their rea.son for being there was their tisefulne.ss. First and foremost they were medicines which could be used by the wife who was the family’s healer. In fact it was probably she and not her husband, who would have trans¬ planted the herbs from the wild so that they were available when she needed them. For serious illne.s.ses she could perhaps call on the monastic healer if one were close, lady of the manor or more likely the community's wise woman whose practical healing skills were often wrapped in a cloak of mysticism. 1’here were physicians and surgeons being trained but they lived in the towns and cities and treated the court nobility or tho.se in a position to pay. So mostly the cottage wife had to rely on her own knowledge handed down from her mother and grandmother, and the plants growing in her garden or close by. If her husband cut himself witli a rusty .scythe, she could treat it with betony (tr perhaps a slice of horseradish. If a child had wonus, she would give a tea of wormwood or tansy. For earache she would use chamomile and poppy. There were herbs to treat the all-too-common ailments such as muscular aches and pains, arthritis and rheuma¬ tism, digestive disorders and constipation, which was a major problem. Eye diseases caused by poor diet tind an open hearth in smoke filled homes could be treated with borage, mallow or eyebright picked in the garden. For res¬ piratory problems she could rely on hoi'eliound, rosemary, opium poppy, hollyhocks and thyme. She may perhaps for good measure also recite verse with a mystical flavour based on Christian teachings or .superstitious beliefs, but for the most part her success was based on the healing power of her herbs. If Christian teaching gave individital herbs greater power throirgh asso¬ ciation then it was -all to the good - a garden containing Mary’s Gold (marigolds), Lady’s Mantle, Madonna Lily, Lungwort, Oirr Lady’s Delight (heartsease) wcruld have the best of both worlds when it came to curing illness. Wliat's more, becairse of the inherent power of so many herbs, they could protect against the hannful spirits which cairsed disea.se in the first place. So it was advantageous to grow them near the house, atb them on lintels or fireplaces, or even incorponite them into the structure of the building. A large percentage of the plants known to have been grown in early cottage gardens were there for their value as medicines: plants such as garlic, ground ivy, elecam¬ pane, centaury, fennel, chamomile, thyme, mallow, pellito- ry, violets, parsley, costmary, southernwood, sage, hyssop, mint, rue and many more. Herbs therefore were invaluable when it came to adding flavour and variety to the bland pottage or one-pot meal people suivived on Herbs were valued as seasonings. The diet for poor people consi.sted largely of vegetables such as turnips, cabbage, parsnips, beet, pe;is and suchlike with perhaps a piece of salt fish, .salted jrcrrk or a rabbit poached from the local estate. I lerbs therefore were invaluable when it came to adding flavour and variety to the bland pottage or one- pot meal people suiv'ived on. Herbs such as mallow, sorrel and lovage were pot-herbs to be eaten in large cjuantities, others were added more judiciously - thyme, fennel, garlic, .sav(rry, mint, rue... It’s worthwhile remembering al.so that Christianity was a powerful force from the Middle Ages onwards - if the 10 church said that you liad to have a fast day once a week and go without meat during the whole of Lent, tlien you did so, and put up with the monotonous diet which was allowed. Fortunately herbs and spices were acceptable so a great range of culinary herbs could be and were used to good effect. Tus.ser in the sixteenth centuty' lists among the herbs, roots and seeds for use in the kitchen: avens, burnet, clary, cress, dock, marigold, pennyroyal, rosemary, parsley, prim¬ rose, violets, alexanders, purslane, mu.stard, sage, rocket, tarragon - many more again can be added to that list. We often hear that the lady of the manor had a still room for preparing her remedies and preserving her excess crops for later use. Folklore surrounding potpouiri compo¬ sition tells how she put her fre.sh ro.ses in a pot, layered them with salt, then buried the whole thing in the ground. Six months later she had the pot dug up and smashed to remove the fragrant rotten-pot (potpotirri) which would be u.sed to fumigate and deodori.se her home. Unfortunately the early cottager didn’t have such luxury and I doubt whether he or his wife had time to bother about potpourri - or could afford to waste a valuable pert for that matter. But the cottager did use herbs for fragrance. Common herbs such as lavender, lady’s bedstraw, sweet marjoram, gillytlow'ers, rosemary, sw'eet w'oodruff, werrmwood and lad’s love would be harvested and strewn across the fkrors to deter tleas and other pests, to help insulate against damp which affected the cottagers’ joints, and generally help disguise .some of the pungent smells of everyday life. Farkinson in his Paradisi Ui Sole, Panidisits Terrestris (Parkinson’s Farthly Paradise) says of germander that it was ‘much u.sed as a strewing herb for houses, being pretty and .sweet’. Just think of the wonderful source of ready-made compost the cottager would have each time he replaced his strewing material! The herb garden provided dyeing material to colour cloth woven, or later bought, by the cottager’s wife. Angelica Most of 'what the cottager gre’w, he grew for a purpose - if what he grew had flowers whicli were attractive so much the better - but their reason for being there was their usefulness gave a bluish grey, bedstraw gave a red, weld gave a yellow, chamomile — gold, elderberry — purple, tansy - green, and so on. Later on, dyeing herbs became less important as dyed cloth became readily available and mcjre people could afford to buy it, but the earlier cottager had to rely on what his garden would provide and that includ¬ ed dyes. Perhaps it also included the tea.sel, that thistle looking weed which can be seen throughout the roadsides in Tasmania. It had been u.sed since antiquity to card wool and raise the ntij’) (vn woollen materials. 'Where a cottager’s wife spun her own wttol and perhaps wove her own mate¬ rial, the tea.sel would be worth growing. Certainly she grew soapwort for its cleansing power on woollen clothing. So you can see that herlvs of one .sort or another were of utmost importance to the cottager and would be cared for as much as tlie vegetables and faiits which were also part of the garden. Many were multi-purpo.se. For example, violets were u.sed as the basis of a remedy for coughs and sore throats, but were also added to .salads; marigolds were used as a medicine as w'ell as a .seasoning. Box could be used to treat rheumatic aches and pains as w'ell as the bites of mad dogs and the wood was u.seful for making weavers’ shuttles, bobbins for lacevvork, spoons and other w'ooden items. Many of course would be very beautiful (eg poppies, violets, clove pinks, monkshood, marigolds) and such beauty would not have gone unrecognised and was encouraged as time went on. Herbs with beautiful flowers or which were fragrant were welcome in the cottage garden and were encouraged to grow in profusion. Clove pinks, marigolds, hollyhocks, monkshood, goldenrod, lavender, honeysuckle, lady’s mantle, germander - all moved from the medicinal side of the garden to the ornamental While cottage gardens progressed from the disorganised survival gardens of late medieval times to the more .struc¬ tured gardens of the seventeenth century and later, the role of herbs in the cottage garden remained largely unchanged for much of that time until the stabilising of the political situation and rising .standard of living changed social conditions. The introduction of new foods from the New World added variety to the diet, resulting in less dependence on the wide range of culinary and pot herbs. A more scientific approach to medicine and new attitudes towards hygiene led to changes in medical treatment and greater access to profe.ssional medical help — herbs lost some of their impor¬ tance in health care. Strewing became unfashionable. Later on the Industrial Revolution changed manufacturing prac¬ tices and the established cultural ways. Many herbs were still used for basic medical treatment - chamomile was still needed to help soothe a fevered child; feveri'ew could still be relied on to ease a headache; hore- hound was e.ssential for respiratory di.sease. Others lost their appeal in favour of those that were being proven to be u.seful by a more modern scientifically-orientated herbalism. The foxglove fell from favour only to be later reinstated by the medical profession. Coltsfoot, once widely valued for coughs and respiratory disorders fell from favour as did eyebright, a specific for eye inflamma¬ tion. Better hygiene and living standards brought a freedom from the constancy of the diseases prevalent in earlier times and a better chance of effectively treating 11 those that did occur. Herbs were to remain important in the kitchen, but the more common ones - garlic, sage, parsley, savory, rose¬ mary, marjoram, burnet, chives, thyme, bay, balm. Less common or flavoursome herbs were discarded as they were no longer needed for fillers. Herbs with beautiful flowers or which were fragrant were welcome in the cottage garden and were encouraged to grow in profusion. Clove pinks, marigolds, hollyhocks, monkshood, goldenrod, lavender, honey^suckle, lady’s mantle, germander - all moved from the medicinal side of the garden to the ornamental. The more they were tended the more some of them developed, resulting in larger flowers and a tidier habit. Herbs without beautiful flowers, or which had nothing to offer in the way of scent, disappeared altogether or sur¬ vived in the cottage garden because of their ability to self¬ seed and turn up in unexpected places each year. So you can see that the role of herbs in the cottage garden, from being quite stable in early centuries, did change significantly with the maturing of the cottage garden style which in itself had so much to do with the changing social conditions. At the height of the cottage garden evolution in the nine¬ teenth century, herbs were very much in evidence in the cotUige garden, .some used in cooking, some in medicine. A great many were there because of their beauty. Their role had evolved from the stage where they had to be grown because their presence in the garden meant the well-being of the cottager and his family, to the stage where they were part and parcel of an ae.sthetically pleas¬ ing style useful in many respects but not necessarily as essential as earlier on. Their role in people’s lives contin¬ ued to change, independently of any role they had in the cottage garden, because of changes taking phice in society as a whole, but those changes are outside the sphere of this ttilk .so I won’t go into it further. I lerbs are still grown as an important part of the modern version of the cottage garden. Many would not be recog¬ nised as herbs by cottage gardeners unaware erf their p;ist histories and relevance. Others are more familiar t(j people - mint, parsley, savory, thyme, sage, marjoram. Some would be used for flavour in food, some for use in craft activities which are often a.ssociated with cottage gardeners today, .some maybe even as home remedies by those with an interest in herbal medicine. Most however ;ire included because of their traditional link with the cottage garden and the recognition that herbs - once useful in so many ways - were one of the corner¬ stones of the evolution of the cottage garden style which has once again become so popular. Kim Fletcher Calendar of Events continued from back page plan for part of Callan Park gardens. Time 2pm. Book¬ ings essential, ph 747 3301 or 969 3043 Cost $5 includes refreshment Meet Main entrance in Balmain Road (opposite Cecily Street Lilyfield). JUNE VICTORIAN BRANCH _ • Tuesday 14 Illustrated talk by Trisha Dixon on the Gardens and Plants of Edna Walling. Venue; National Herbarium, Birdwood Avenue, South Yarra. Time: 8.00 pm Book¬ ings: e.ssential. Cost; Members $7; Guests $10; Students $5. Enquiries: National Office: (03) 650 5043. AUGUST VICTORIAN BRANCH _ • Tuesday 9 Annual General Meeting. Venue: National Herbarium, Birdwood Avenue, South Yarra. Time: 7.30 pm SEPTEMBER VICTORIAN BRANCH _ • Sunday 11 Lecture and tour on Melbourne’s Parks and Gardens - Past and Future by Georgina Whitehead. Venue: National Herbarium, Birdwood Avenue, South Yarra. Time: 10.00 am.. Cost: Members $10; Guests $13; Stu¬ dents $5. BYO lunch. Enquiries: National Office (03) 650 5043. OCTOBER NATI ONAL MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE _ • Friday 21 to Monday 24 1994 National Conference ‘A Changing Landscape’ - A .study of the Macedon Ranges. Venue: Exhibition Build¬ ing, Nicholson Street, Carlton. • Monday 24 Post Conference Garden Tour DECEMBER VICTORIAN B RANCH _ • Monday 5 Christmas Party. Venue: Williamstown Botanic Gardens. 12 Da\ id Beaver The Australian Cottage Garden Couase gardens often liave particular associations. In cliildhooci, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's liouse at Tecoma in tlie Dandenongs. It was tlie dearest cottage set on a sloping triangular block, its lia.se easing gently down a heavily timbered creek bank with the ‘front garden’ wedged into the apex. 1’he gateway in the privet hedge was frtimed by a wooden pergola covered in a Wichuraiana Rose. On the woven wire gate was a brass name |>late which humbly stated that this was ‘The Ne.st’. We children thought it great fun when grandmother took in a boarder called Miss Crow and so she became Mi.ss Crow, The Ne.st, Gums Avenue. How we loved that garden with its numerous plum trees, paths edged in field .stones, ma.s.ses of bulbs, banks of Hydrangeas, ferns in the shadowy corners and honey- .suckle on the old weatherboard outhou.se. While the cottage garden in Aiustralia has evolved over two hundred years and been subject to various influences, there remains an identifiable tradition. The smaller private dwelling on its own portion of land became an essential element in the .social fabric of the Australian colonies. To this day, Au.stralians generally hold to the ideal of a ‘block’ of freehold land upon which they can tend a garden or simply feel they can relax in their own space. All kinds of peojile lived in cottages in the early decades of European settlement including tho.se who later built stib.stantial resi- Righl: All old. dmiighl /o/e/rt/i/Agave aniericana ms/r/e.? heiiecilh a spii'cidiiig Moiiteivy Pine at thefniiil ofMarmy's coIMf’e, in the paid rush town of Hill P.nd, NSW Below: A thnving sjx’cimen of Honeysuckle ( Lonicera fragrantissimal in a collage garden al Hill End. NSW 13 David Beaver dences. Cottage dwellings were inv'ariably given an area of ground protected by a stout fence of pickets or palings or in some cases of stone. VegeUibles, vines, fruit trees and some herbs were an e.ssential inclusion with flowers planted mostly for sentiment and generally tended by the female members of the family. 'Ilie need for shelter was also answered through the u.se of trees, shaibs and various climbing plants. Many of the areas opened up for settlement offered con¬ ditions for plant growth ranging from good to excellent. Some plants familiar in Old World gardens proved difficult in the Antipodes, however, many others thrived. The humble geranium flourished in most regions as did the various daisies. Faiits such as peaches, plums and apricots were notably abundant. An Australian cottage garden, from examples close to the English model to evolved Australian variations, could be as fruitful and floriferous as any at ‘home’. Harsh winters were a problem in some areas but in most cases hot summers and a shortage of water provided the greatest constraint. In social temis it is important to note that the increasing acceptance of gardening as a valid pastime for all classes was also an important positive force in the colonial era. Moralists championed the well-kept cottage and garden as an essential element in a well-ordered society. The ide¬ alised image of the romantic cottage garden was seen in various publications and popular prints, and by the end of last century was widely celebnited. Changing conditions in literacy, new printing technology, acce.s.s to libniries, reticu¬ lated water, fertilisers, cheap seeds and garden guides all helped advance the popularity of tlie cottage garden. An Australian cottage garden, from examples close to the English model to evolved Australian variations, could be as fruitful and floriferous as any at ‘home’ Plants not purchased from nurserymen or grown from commercial seeds were usually acquired through exchange between family or friends. Sara Midgley who lived at Yangery Grange at Koroit in Victoria wrote in her diary on 2 December 1856: A few days ago William brought from Mrs Bostock’s Garden several slips of holly and some slips of small roses which he got given. On 22 July 1857 she wrote: Mother, Eliza and 1 have been gardening today, the day has been very fine. William has been to Mrs Muirson's and got .some Moss Rose cuttings which we have long wished for, he also got some slips of the Pa.ssion I'lower, the Acacia [Rohinia'i], the Broom and the Cape Honeysuckle. The entry for 27 July reads: I went up to Mrs Anderson’s this afternoon with some cut¬ tings and bulbous roots, found them busy gardening, got some rose trees of Scarlet and Cabbage varieties, some Fuchsia cuttings and hollyhock and evening primrose plants back with me.i Australia’s early cottage gardens are recorded in sketches and paintings and described in letters, diaries, journals and various publications. With outdoor photography gathering interest from the middle of la.st centur>', we have a wonderful record of both established gardens and of the gardens created by succe.ssive waves of .settlers. We can identify some of the basic types beginning with the cla.ssic unsophis¬ ticated cottage garden, a happy mixture of the practical and the decorativ'e. The sophisticated or self con.scious approach to cottage gardening was evident in schemes carefully planned to give a particular impression. A third category was the cottage garden with formal design elements borrowed from larger schemes. Old photographs show us that even the .smallest cottages of bark, slab, mud or rubble could have fomial ‘front’ gardens, some designed as miniature parterres with complex patterns bordered in dianthus, box, thrift or materials such as stone or brick or even discarded bottles. There were all kinds of structures to be found in cottage gardens from simple archways to aistic shade houses In dry areas, drought-proof plants such as decorative cacti and succulents such as .Sedums or Sempervivums were combined with hardy shrubs such as Lonicera fm- gnvUissima or trees such as liracbychlton /x)lpuhwiis, the Kumijong. Culinary herbs were grown as were others for disinfectants, deodorants, or insect repellents. Some of the.se herbs were extremely drought tolenint and today we often see Artemisia arborescens on an old house site when little else remains. There were all kinds of .staictures to be found in cottage gardens from simple archways to rustic shade houses. There were also tubs and pots, troughs and stone sinks, home-made ornaments, rustic seats, aviaries and miniature ponds. In modern times, the tradition continues with the use of concrete figures, fancy containers and even swans made from refashioned car tyres! Australitin cottage gardens have gone through various eras of influence in the twentieth century. In the 1920s when lawns bordered with brightly coloured ranks of annuals was the pervasive style, Edna Walling began a campaign to recapture the older traditions. She wrote in 1926 in favour of the border of herbaceous perennials: ‘There are two things in which most gardens are deficient: low-growing shrubs and herbaceous perennials.’ Her writ¬ ings over thiity to fi^rty years brought into renewed focus the cla.ssic old world cottage set in a garden of favourite cottage plants. Over the past decade, the late.st revival of the cottage style has been influential in shaping gardens on every scale. If new fashions appear to influence gardens generally, we can be confident that the traditional cottage styles will continue to find a place. Peter CiiJJley References 1 McCorkell, H A (ed) The Diaries of Sarah Midgley and Richard Skilheck, Cassell Australia, 1967 14 The Education of (another! ) Gardener I tliink it was Russell Page (or some other garden design pundit) who said that if you liad lieautiful views you needn’t bother making a garden, since the two would only compete with each other. This alwtiys seemed like a silly remark to me; 1 prefer Alberti's Renaissance tlictum, that the view should be framed by a 'delicacy of gardens’. Now that I’ve been to I'asmania, howev^er. I can cjuite under¬ stand what Page meant. If I had serious land.scape like that to deal with, I think I’d ju.st park my deckchair in the shade and relinciuish any thought of ever making a garden that could begin to compete. Along the road to Bothwell, we drove past a regenerating forest of eucalypts, the rosy russet pink new growth underpinned by the pewter shades of mature foliage and the buttery lemon froth of wattle. And then there w'ere the man ferns, pandani groves and tussocks of pineapple grass, tea-tree and other assorted goodies at Mt Field. Perhaps that is why I found the native gardens so fasci¬ nating. In Tasmania I.indsay Campbell has a garden on a mountain side at the end of a snaky dirt track, which given the odds on bush fire is kind of a spooky place to build a house. Hut the view from his terrace is stupendous, so you can understand his choice of site. According to him, the native garden he has planted around the hou.se has protec¬ tive value as well as aesthetic. When Lindsay says he excludes exotics, that means he bars mainland natives too. Joanne Morris afso gardens on a hillside, in direct competi¬ tion to the eye-popping vistas from the teirace of her Palm Beach house. .She uses a broader palette of native plants, but like Lind.say, she also tip-prunes, cuts back and feeds selectively to get the plants to peiform their best, which is apparently what you must do to avoid the gninge look that for so long characterised the bush garden. All this is not to say that I did not enjoy the cottage gardens we saw on the conference. When Peter Cuffley showed us the picture of the little shack in a bush clearing, with its pebble edged beds and cottage flow'ers holding the front line against the alien and, for all they knew, life-threatening flora and fauna, I immediately understood the colonists’ desperate need to surround their home with the familiar. What caught my eye in the gardens we visited was their plan rather than the plants, because (let’s face it) in Kngland we have more herbaceous material than is good for us, but what we can’t .seem to do (pace Alan Bloom) is design good infomial gardens. Perhaps this says something about the Fnglish character, but it probably has more to do with architectural styles and the land.scape. Those parts of England that haven't been paved for motorways and shop¬ ping malls are chop]:)ed up into little hedged and fenced fields, and the houses, .even the prettiest of cottages, arc- boxy. Set an informal plan again.st that lot and it simply jars, whereas in Australia, the frest architecture seems to grow out of its surroundings; and in the garden, informal mixed beds of flower and shnib linked by winding paths merge effortle.ssly into the open expan.ses of the natural land.scape. As some of you will have discovered, 1 am from the United States, and although I’ve lived in England for twenty-five years, I still remember the big skies, the endle.ss horizons, the deep .sh:idy porches, tidy small-town main streets, big bold city avenues and the ea.sy openness Eihne Clarke shaiiiig gardener 's stories with Mrs Nathy Hills of Hamilton of lile in the American midwest, where 1 grew up. So many of you asked me if 1 wasn’t reminded of England by what I .saw, and to a small degree I was, but I was much more aware trf being once again in a young country that was finding iLs own style and its own voice, and where people were proud of what had been achieved and looking forward to what they had yet to do. So here I sit in my snowbound Norfolk garden, remem¬ bering the beauty of the candlebark maples in Bob and Betty Lewis’s garden near Bridgewater Falls, the bluebells and acjuilegias in the woods at ‘Dreamthorpe’ where the Ilandburys are restoring the garden and house, the ferry boat ride across the harbour from Neutral Bay to the opera hou.se, wombat cuddling, lamingtons, and the countless good times I had everyxvhere I went. I can hardly wait to come back: to .see Kathy Barrington's garden (all those iri.ses!), to visit Gay and Kaes Klok’s Sandy Bay garden (now that’s a town garden), to spend more time in the I lobart Botiinical Garden, and especially to visit the 'Victo¬ ria Market in Melbourne with Helen Page. In the meantime. I'll con.sole my.self by trying to grow kan¬ garoo paws in my greenhouse, and .saving up to purchase a sulirhur-crested cockatoo. It’s going to be a long winter. Etbne Clarke 15 Peter Cripps ne picking garden at Govenimenl House. Hobart, evoking thefeel of a cottage garden; Richard Aitken's AGHS confeivnce paper on the history of the Government House garden will appear in a siihsequent issue of this journal . * tK i iiX. Calendar of Events MARCH VICTORIAN BRANCH _ • Thursday 17 An illustrated talk by Barry Moignard on the well- known Kelways Nurseiy, England, breeders of Faeony- roses and Irises, instrumental in establishing the Chelsea Flower Show, and plant exporter to Europe, including Monet’s garden at Giverny. Venue: Merton Hall, Anderson Street. South Yarra. Time: 7.30 pm. Cost: Members $5; Guests S7. Bookings: essential. Enquiries: National Office (03) 650 5043. SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS/ SOUTHERN NSW BRANCH • Saturday 19 The ckiy will take the form of a lecture by John Brookes, famous English landscape designer and author, followed by lunch and then visits to some inter¬ esting gardens in the district. Tour of Nobelius Heritage Nursery, Lake Emerald Arboretum, and 'Glen Harrow’, the J C Cole Nurseiy at Belgrave. Talks on these two early Victorian nurseries and inspection of remnant plantings and rare trees. Venue: Nobelius Museum, Crichton Road, Emerald - Melway Ref: 127 G4. Time: from 10.00 am. Cost: Members $10; Guests .$12 (includes morning tea), BYO lunch, self drive. Bookings: essential. Enquiries: John Hawker (03) 628 5477. MAY SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS/SOUTHERN NSW BRANCH • Sunday 22 Please keep this day free for a picnic at Bundanon - famous property of Arthur ;ind Yvonne Boyd given to the nation in 1993- 'I'he day will include an inspection of the garden and a conducted tour of the hou.se and studio. APRIL VICTORIAN BRANCH • Sunday 24 SYDNEY & NORTHERN NSW BRANCH_ • Sunday 1 History walk of Rozelle Hospital garden (Callan Park and Broughton Hall), commentary by Colleen Morris, AGHS member, who has worked on a conservation CONTINUKI) ON PAGE 12 Kcgisterecl by Auslraliii i’o.st I’ulilicaiion No. NIMI 1733 Richard Aitken