Contents
Snippets: Warrnambool – 150 years on the spot
Truth and beauty – the purpose and reception of (botanical) gardens Stephen Forbes
In Australia’s capital cities the botanic gardens are part of our lives. We’re introduced to these beautiful gardens as children. As we age, perhaps we explore these gardens more deeply to reveal other sides of their character. Botanic gardens then are as much a gallery of memories as a gallery of plants.
Ann Jacob’s Barossa garden Julie Holbrook Tolley
Ann Jacob was an Englishwoman who grew vegetables, fruit, vines and flowers in the Barossa Valley in the 1830s. She is of considerable interest as one of the earliest colonial gardeners in South Australia.
Offington: a vanished St Kilda Road mansion and its garden Tim Gatehouse
Amongst the mansions which once lined St Kilda Road, Melbourne, was Offington, once as famous for its garden as for its historical associations. It stood for exactly 100 years, from 1871 to 1971. The author saw it in the last stages of its demise when the house was a roofless shell and the garden a wilderness pierced by bulldozer paths, but even in that state, it possessed a romantic appeal which prompted a wish to investigate its past.
The story of a tree Max Nankervis
Back in the 1970s Queens Road, South Melbourne, began yet another transformation away from the days when it was a boulevard almost exclusively lined with grand Victorian mansions built around 1875-95. Lakeside, was on such 1870s elegant single-storey house. Dominating the southern front boundary was a large Magnolia grandiflora. It is the only remnant of Lakeside left today.
Pioneering tropical horticulture John Mulvaney
Patrick Cahill (1862-1923) settled at Oenpelli (now Gunbalanyah) on the East Alligator River, 250 km east of Darwin. Paddy Cahill was a pioneer Top End horticulturalist and farmer.
Capability Brown: the Shakespeare of gardening Sarah Rutherford
The prominent influence of English 18th century landscape designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-83) led to a conception of him as the Shakespeare of gardening. The 300th anniversary of his birth in 2016 has prompted a revival of interest in this great landscape designer and his enduring influence.
The earliest recorded tomato in Britain, in Wales Elisabeth Whittle
The search for the earliest recorded tomato grown in Britain widens to Wales. There is incontrovertible evidence that it was grown by Sir Edward Stradling in his garden at St Donat’s Castle, in the Vale of Glamorgan, before 1590.
The historians, the polymath, the impresario and their system garden Trevor Pitkin
This is a story that runs back 160 years to the moment of commitment to establish a systematic botanic teaching garden (System Garden) at the University of Melbourne. The early history of this garden now has an interesting link to the present, in the form of the common backgrounds of its original designer, Edward La Trobe Bateman, and the horticulturist now tending it, who himself has a designer background.
Bendigo East Avenue of Honour Gemma Starr
Bendigo East Avenue of Honour located on the Bendigo East state school site in Victoria turned 100 years old this year. The avenue, planted by the East Bendigo primary school children on Arbor Day 16 June 1916, was the result of a state-wide Victorian Education Department ‘Anzac Avenue’ tree planting initiative. 2016 also marked the demise of the Avenue.
Profile: Elizabeth Teed
A profile of AGHS’s honorary treasurer.