Vol. 24 No. 4 April/May/June 2013 HISTORY Cover and below: wide brown land’ is a public artwork commissioned by the ACT Government for the National Arboretum Canberra. It sits on the crest of a hill adjacent to the existing Himalayan Cedar Forest. The work was conceived by an artistic collaboration headed by Futago. Writer Chris Viney and sculptor Marcus Tatton were invited to develop ideas originally on a much smaller scale for Garran shops. The work was scaled up at the request of Arts ACT for its current lofty position. Photo: Sarah Rowlands AUSTRALIAN GARDEN HISTORY Patron Sue Ebury- Countess of Wilton Executive Officer Phoebe LaGerche-Wijsnnan Enquiries TollFree I 800 678 446 Phone 03 9650 5043 Fax 03 9650 8470 Email info@gardenhistorysociety.org.au Website www.gardenhistorysociety.org.au Postal Address AGHS, Gate Lodge 1 00 Birdwood Avenue Melbourne Victoria 3004 Publication Australian Garden History, the official journal of the Australian Garden History Society, is published quarterly Editors Christina Dyson Richard Aitken editor@gardenhistorysociety.org.au 8 Eastern Place, Hawthorn East, Victoria, 3 1 23 ISSN 1033-3673 Subscriptions (GST INCLUSIVE) For I year Single $67 Fannily $92 Corporate $2 1 5 Youth $22 (UNDER 25 YEARS OF AGE) Non-profit organisations $92 Advertising Rates 1/8 page $ I 32 (2+ issues $ 1 2 1 each) 1/4 page $220 (2+ issues $ 1 98 each) 1/2 page $330 (2+ issues $275 each) Full page $550 (2+ issues $495 each) Inserts $440 for Australia-wide mailing Pro-rata for state-wide mailing Editorial Advisory Committee CONVENOR Christine Reid MEMBERS Glenn Cooke Timothy Hubbard Colleen Morris Prue Slatyer johnViska NATIONAL MANAGEMENT John Taylor (Chairman) Ray Choate (Vice Chairman) Lynne Walker (Secretary) Kathy Wright (Treasurer) Elected Members Ray Choate John Dwyer Trisha Burkitt Stuart Read John Taylor johnViska Lynne Walker Kathy Wright State Representatives ACT Nancy Clarke NSW Laurel Cheetham QLD Glenn Cooke SA Richard Nolan WA Caroline Grant VIC Val Stewart TAS Mike Evans BRANCH CONTACTS ACT /Monaro/Riverina Dr Louise Moran 44 Wilson Street Curtin ACT 2605 Phone: (02) 628 I 2493 Queensland Glenn R Cooke Phone: 07 3846 1050 racoontoo@gmail.com COMMITTEE South Australia Ray Choate Barr Smith Library University of Adelaide Adelaide SA 5005 Phone: 08 8303 4064 ray.choate@adelaide.edu.au Southern Highlands Laurel Cheetham 28 Charlotte Street Burradoo NSW 2576 Phone: 02 486 1 7132 l.cheetham@bigpond.com Sydney & Northern NSW Stuart Read Phone: 02 9326 9468 Stuart 1 962@bigpond.com Tasmania Elizabeth Kerry PO Box 89, Richmond TAS 7025 Phone: (03) 6260 4216 liz.kerry@keypoint.com.au Victoria Dr Anne Vale PO Box 7, Koonwarra VIC 3954 Phone: 03 5664 3104 heriscapes@optusnetcom.au Western Australia Caroline Grant 9 A Grange Street Claremont WA 60 1 0 chhgrant@yahoo.com Australian Garden History welcomes contributions of any length up to 1 500 words. Prospective contributors are strongly advised to send a short outline to the editors prior to submission of text or images. The views expressed in this journal are those of the contributors and are not necessarily shared by the Australian Garden History Society. 2 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 Inviting gestures: scholarship, heritage, and advocacy Christina Dyson & Richard Aitken This issue of Australian Garden History celebrates the centenary of our national capital’s naming, but — like each issue — it is also an ongoing celebration of the Australian Garden History Society and its myriad activities and achievements. Canberra forms the cornerstone of one of the Society’s most active branches, embracing the Australian Capital Territory, Monaro, and Riverina. This Branch has drawn together an astonishing range of speakers, tours, and activities to celebrate Canberra’s centennial year, and taken together, this is surely one of the most ambitious such programmes in the Society’s history. Read about these events on the Society’s website and in our Diary Dates — and plan your trip now! Elsewhere we read of a major project coordinated by the Branch, to digitise and interpret the records of the Yarralumla Nursery. It was from this facility that Canberra sourced the raw material that created its widely praised garden city character on the bones provided by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin in their award-winning plan. The people who ran this nursery, and did so much to embellish the city with its stock — such as Charles Weston and Lindsay Pryor — are celebrated, as are those such as John Gray who kept this tradition alive during a period of consolidation and change. The Branch has also had a fine tradition of publishing, and Rob Freestone’s magisterial overview of Canberra and its designed landscape historiography highlights a literature that is perhaps as rich per capita as any part of Australia. Amongst this bibliography we find publications such as Early Ainslie Gardens, published almost a decade ago as a direct result of branch-level initiatives within the AGHS. In past issues we have also reported on conservation advocacy emanating from the ACT Branch concerning Lake Burley Griffin. Our cover and associated article in this issue by Max Bourke look forward to the continuing contribution that gardens and the designed landscape — in this case the new National Arboretum — are making for the capital and for the nation. This embodies a creative spirit we must encourage and forms a heritage that we must safeguard. Achievements such as this are hard won. They are based on a combination of creative spirit and enterprise. In such matters the AGHS can play a leading role. We are all familiar with the individual words that constitute the Society’s name — Australian Garden History Society — and each stands for a significant part of our mission: our geographical focus, our field of interest, our thematic approach, and the basis of our organisation. But what else might these letters stand for, and what sort of Society do members want.^ Among many facets of interest we see Advocacy, Gesture, Heritage, and Scholarship as leading qualities. As editors we are in a privileged position to see the AGHS from a national perspective, admiring the cumulative dedication of its constituent branches, responsive to its National Management Committee, setting the agenda for its journal. In all we do, we aim to reflect the Society’s mission by showcasing the tangible and often intangible spirit of our organisation. Contents Canberra's gardens, parks, and landscape: a bibliographical essay ROBERT FREESTONE 5 Planting a vision: Canberra's Yarralumla Nursery records LENORE COLTHEART 12 Some garden references in the Sydney office library of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin JEFF TURNBULL 16 Looking for Charles Weston JOHN GRAY 19 The National Arboretum Canberra: an historic concept with an Australian twist MAX BOURKE 23 For the bookshelf 28 Recent releases 29 Dialogue 31 AGHS News 32 Diary dates 33 The Urban Forest: trees in our backyard and beyond CAROLINE GRANT 35 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/lMay/June 2013 3 Scholarship must underpin everything we do. Without sound researeh — eombining doeumentary sourees, site surveys, understandings of eontext and eomparative examples, and sueeinet analysis — we are ill-prepared to eomprehend, interpret, and defend Australia’s garden heritage. We need eomprehensive data not only on individual plaees, but thematie studies of different types and styles of gardens, plants and the hortieultural teehniques that nurtured their garden use, garden buildings and struetures, eultural eontexts in whieh garden making took plaee — in faet, we have barely seratehed the surfaee of the neeessary seholarship, espeeially when the eontinuing digitisation of Australian newspapers has in reeent years yielded the potential to unearth a remarkably exeiting and finely nuaneed understanding of our garden heritage. And what of this word ‘heritage’.^ It seems to have eome into vogue in the 1970s, with that great wave of enthusiasm for environmental and eultural eonservation. The dietionary provides many meanings, but the sense of ‘things we want to keep’ and the eoneept of ‘the national estate’ — phrases that paralleled the formation in 1975 of the Australian Heritage Commission — eonvey its essenee in simple terms. The Freneh word patrimoine is also riehly expressive in this eontext. Australia’s eulturally signifieant gardens and designed landseapes form an often overlooked yet signifieant part of Australia’s rieh eultural heritage — for the insights they ean offer onto soeial and eultural history, attitudes to environment, ehanging tastes, reminding us how our relationship to landseape has ehanged and evolved. And to safeguard this heritage, we must have easy aeeess to the data that seholarship has yielded and whieh forms its vital underpinning. Advocaey is a eontinuing strength and emphasis of the Australian Garden History Soeiety, for what use is seholarship without equal efforts towards eonservation through advoeaey for proteeting the vulnerable heritage that we regard so fondly. The Soeiety has and will eontinue to rally against unsympathetie developments that would adversely impaet upon signifieant historie gardens and other designed landseapes. But, as our former ehairman John Dwyer noted in a reeent issue of this journal, this requires ongoing vigilanee. For an organisation sueh as the AGHS — with limited resourees — it also requires eareful targeting to ensure that we ean make a differenee. Cooperation with kindred organisations, is a key to effeetive use of limited resourees. So too, is the eareful prioritisation of plaees on whieh we neeessarily wish to eoneentrate our efforts and the National Management Committee has been grappling with this issue in reeent times in a series of initiatives (that we intend to profile in eoming issues of the journal). Gesture is very mueh of the moment. We all use it with smart phones, tablets, and laptop eomputers. In aeademie terms, gesture is in the aseendant. It is expressive, signals emphasis and intent, values soeial aetion. And yet it has its pitfalls — it relies on elarity to eonvey its full meaning and to avoid misunderstandings. In a membership-based Soeiety sueh as ours, gesture is erueial. One of the faetors underpinning the Soeiety’s sueeess over the deeades has been a spirit of generosity among and between members, and between members, branehes, and national eommittees. As well, the position of exeeutive offieer has been a erueial linehpin in this delieate balanee and we have been extremely fortunate in our ineumbents. People being treated on an equal level and with a generous spirit has eharaeterised many sueeessful ventures that suffuse Australia’s garden history, in partieular those amateur enthusiasts and professionals who sought to expand our knowledge about Australian plants. Think of the spirit that has underpinned our natural history endeavours, with the long and rieh tradition of field naturalist soeieties, and also of the eollaborative spirit that has underpinned this eountry’s hortieultural enterprise. Perhaps this is eharaeteristie of gardeners generally, of people happy to get their hands dirty. Sueh a spirit was exemplified in the Soeiety’s founding ehair and patron. Dame Elisabeth Murdoeh. In some ways this might seem to refleet old fashioned values, an unfashionable modus operand!, but it is a model we hope will eontinue to be fostered and eneouraged as the Soeiety maintains its premier role as a relevant voiee in seholarship, heritage, and advoeaey. No one person ean undertake all of this single-handedly. We must eo-operate. Our gestures must be inviting, inelusive, and transparent. 4 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 Canberra's gardens, parks, and landscape: a bibliographical essay Canberra has a rich historical literature — much of it unavoidably touching on the designed landscape — highlighted here in bibliographical form as a guide to further reading and research. Canberra’s centenary year of 2013 celebrates the official naming of the Australian capital. But European settlement of the Limestone Plains dates from the 1820s. And of course the traditional owners, the displaced Ngambri people and other linguistic tribes, had lived here for many thousands of years. The key elements of the environmental matrix — to which settlement adapted — stretch back to antiquity. With a combination of grazing and demanding physical geography contributing to the area’s treeless character, the making of Canberra’s modern landscape is in large measure a history of regeneration. The character of all Australian capital cities is defined by their environmental settings. But with Canberra it is patently and palpably in the DNA of the place, expressed across different experiential scales of garden, street, park, precinct, bushland, hillside, and vista. While natural and designed settings of other cities are governed through complex environmental statutes, mostly dating from the late 1960s, Canberra has micro- Oil painting of Duntroon House, Canberra, painted by Fearnleigh L. Montagu, c. 1 870. National Library of Australia: nla.pic-an329 I I 68 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 5 Marion Mahony Griffin’s rendering of the view from the summit of Mount Ainslie, which formed part of the winning competition entry by competitor number 29 (a.k.a. Walter Burley Griffin). Courtesy of National Archives of Australia: A7I0, 48 Official buildings in the Federal Gapital, April 1910, as recorded in the 1913 annual report of the Lands and Survey Branch, Department of Home Affairs. Pictured are the first building used as the Lands and Survey office, and part of the Survey Gamp. managed its visible habitat intensively through countless policies, regulations, plans, inquiries, and committees since the foundation of the city. Which other Australian city, for instance, could embed with such deep meaning in its developmental timeline trees gifted by governments and ceremoniously planted by dignitaries ? Through all the early debate on the siting of the federal capital from Federation, there was at least consensus on the need for a beautiful city, respectful of and enhancing its site and situation — a city of gardens, lawns, lakes, parks, and human embellishments. C. Bogue Luffman (1901) told the first federal capital congress in Melbourne in 1901 that the city locality should ‘create the feeling that something real and important lies beyond every horizon’. Canberra has attracted a considerable body of historical writing unavoidably touching on the physical character of the place. Johnson’s (1980) bibliography is one convenient starting place but has never been comprehensively updated. The story of the city has been told through different lenses, such as planning (Fischer 1984, 2013), urban design (Reid 2002), imagery (National Capital Development Commission 1985), politics and symbols (Headon 2003), land tenure (Brennan 1971), and social institutions (Gibbney 1988; Sparke 1988; Gillespie 1991). Although a definitive environmental, garden, or landscape history remains to be written and much of value is locked away in unpublished or undigitised conservation management plans and heritage assessment reports, there are rich resources upon which to draw. The bird’s eye view narrative by Murphy (1979) was one of the first specialised historical essays, being framed within the broader philosophical terrain of the garden city movement and driven by a chronological account of the practical labours of the legendary parks and gardens superintendent Charles \Wston. Firth (1997) recounts a tale of purposeful action involving growing enlightenment and achievement until the history reaches the most recent era of self- government when it expresses concern for the ‘future integrity of the Canberra landscape’. The concise landscape history of Vernon (2006) spans from Charles Coulter’s famous rendering of a waterside capital to the new millennium offerings of Reconciliation and Commonwealth Place, and the triumph of ‘the pictureseque’. Recent national histories of planned landscapes (Freestone 2010) and the landscape architecture profession (Saniga 2012) conspicuously weave Canberra into their narratives. From the early 1 95 os Peter Harrison (1995) had been one of the first to convey a critical appreciation of Canberra as an urban landscape. Hendry (1979) articulated it vigorously in the 1970s: ‘The significance of Canberra as the National Capital is not so much its political aspirations but rather the created landscape which links all its parts together in space and time’. Ken Taylor’s Canberra: city in the landscape (2006) is the most definitive overview from this standpoint and importantly leavens the Griffm-centricity of much Canberra literature. Drilling deeper and authoritatively across a potpourri of Canberra parks and gardens topics is Aitken and Looker (2002). The international competition for the federal capital in 1911— 12 produced over 100 entries. This was a showcase for the major planning movements of the 6 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 day including the British garden eity movement with its accent on the spacious informality of planned residential communities as well as the more mannered geometry of the Euro-inspired American city beautiful movement expressed in stately boulevards and handsome town parks. The great majority of competitors acknowledged tacitly what the emergent town planning movement stood for above all else and across all cultures: space, light, and open space as pillars of healthiness, social efficiency, and general quality of life. John Reps (1997) provides the definitive compendium of extant competition documentation. The winning design by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (married in 19 1 1) represented a skilful fitting of competition building and land use requirements into the topographic constraints and opportunities presented by the Limestone Plains site. The pair infused the resultant ensemble with an idealistically radiant democratic sensibility. Environmental conditions drove their response and the text of their reporting is littered with empathetie references to the ‘theatrical whole’ of the site; the prospect of buildings ‘silhouetted against the dark forested hills’; ‘great garden and water vistas’; and proteeting what ‘primeval luxuriance’ remained. Parks, parkways, and park-like settings were everywhere, especially in residential precincts. These were to feature ‘fore-garden embellishment’ but the Griffins left open just how these areas would be treated, announcing a spectrum of possibilities ‘for private development or small-community initiative to evolve pretty schemes of driveway subdivision, recessed courts, closes, quadrangles, terraces, common gardens, irregular hill garden subdivisions, and a host of similar possibilities, adding incident and variety to a eonsistent whole’ (Canberra 1913). Wide appreciation of the artistic genius of their work in and outside Canberra is now evident and the literature is substantial and growing (Turnbull & Navaretti 1998; Watson 1998; Griffin 2008, McGregor 2009). After the Griffins’ unceremonious exit from Canberra in 1921, authorities buckled down to developing the national capital as a small garden town. The First General Report of the Federal Capital Advisory Committee, chaired by John Sulman in July 1921, restated the vision as a place of ‘simple, pleasing, but unpretentious buildings’ in which ‘the planting of trees for the beautification of avenues and streets, and the provision of park areas’ would be essential. The Committee’s final report in May 1926 documented extensive plantings for shelter, windbreaks, and ornamentation with front hedges in residential area, screening of unsightly works, and creepers to beautify road cuttings. Street plantings were to be formal, with informality in parks. The intention was to concentrate on native flora in the central area although a pragmatic preference for hardy northern hemisphere stock such as cedars and elms became evident (Ereestone 1989, Taylor 2006). All the while, the ground was being prepared for the repopulation of the Limestone Plains. While the workers made do in makeshift camps, and single public servants were confined to hostels, new married immigrants enjoyed single-family dwellings. While Wigmore (1963) provided the first modern history of the city, Denning (1944) had earlier captured the challenges confronting the pioneers. They had left the comfortable civilisation of Melbourne, for the most part, and arrived to find ‘a silent valley mocking the efforts of men’, a rural setting, with ‘raw contours waiting to be Hotel Canberra and the initial stages of a formal landscape setting under construction, c. 1 926. Private collection Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 7 The revised and enlarged second edition of Canberra's first hundred years and after, by Frederick W. Robinson (1927), records 'Canberra in Flood, seen from Mount Pleasant, July l922.The Floods give a very accurate impression of the proposed lakes. The church appears as an island of trees, above the bush on the extreme right.' clothed with verdant trees’ and ‘bare dwellings . . . sound and attractive enough architecturally, but which jutted churlishly out of the red, raw earth, where straggling trees and clumps of ragged grass struggled to survive, and sheep-dung told only too eloquently of a prior tenancy’. Gardening in the 1 920s was one means for married civil servants to adapt to the shock of relocation while also inculcating a sense of community resilience to the isolation and omnipresence of the unelected Federal Capital Commission. Harshness slowly softened by the late 1920s as ‘gardens and lawns were beginning to flourish’ despite the tribulations of summer grasshoppers and winter frosts. The recent turn to oral history has recovered marvellous stories of daily life in early Canberra (Canberra Stories Group 1994). Two key figures in Canberra’s planting were Charles Weston and Lindsay Pryor: Weston in charge from 1913—27; Pryor, Parks and Garden Superintendent from the mid- 1940s. Both have attracted substantive biographical studies (Gray 1999; Hince 1994). Weston’s legacy was his landscape; Pryor’s writings remain accessible and key resources in their own right. In his paper to the first post-war Australian planning conference, held in Canberra’s Albert Hall in 1951 and marking formation of what is now the Planning Institute of Australia, Pryor (1951) noted ‘The immediate environment of Canberra ... is a rather difficult one for tree growing’. In its suburban setting, the elimination of overhead wires permitted ‘a much wider variety of street trees . . . than would otherwise be the case’, while he looked toward enhanced use of native species in gardening. Pryor contributed two chapters to the impressive volume assembled by Commonwealth Librarian Harold White for the 1954 Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science: one on original plant communities and the other summarising the nature and species selection in re-greening of the largely treeless Limestone Plains (Pryor 1954). His Trees in Canberra first published in 1962, was a stocktake after forty-five years of planting on a largely treeless plain with an estimated three million trees and shrubs planted. Canberra’s challenging continental microclimate was hostile to many trees successful elsewhere, such as jacarandas and red-flowering gums (Pryor 1962). If there is a ground zero in the greening of Canberra it is the Yarralumla Nursery. Coltheart (201 1) memorably describes it in her monograph, spinning off the records digitisation project undertaken in 2011 by the ACT, Monaro & Riverina Branch of the Australian Garden History Society. The Nursery ‘made the national capital a garden city and also put the bush in the “bush capital’”. Coltheart highlights the contributions of the Weston and Pryor eras, as well as those who served later including David Shoobridge and Robert Boden (who wrote Favourite Canberra Trees in 1993). Calthorpe’s house and garden remains as a showpiece cultural institution of this era and Canberra’s legacy of garden suburbs provides a remarkable outdoor museum of interwar town planning ‘on garden city lines’ (Freestone 1989) with generous sites for single-family detached houses, staggered setbacks, mannered hedges, nestled in tree lined streets. Andrew Ward’s report (2000) consolidated the cultural significance of these suburbs, such as Reid and Barton, and outlined a prescriptive set of conservation guidelines that have been substantially put into effect. Attitudes to these environments in the early 1950s were not all favourable with a mood emerging in the early 1950s that Canberra needed to re-urbanise. Visiting Canadian academic Benjamin Higgins (1951) writing in the Community Planning Review, saw Canberra as a scattered, inconvenient place, ‘a garden without a city’. Attention to its ‘look’ was given more weight than its daily functioning, a sentiment echoed by A.J. Brown (1952) who wrote — and he was being harshly critical — in the Town Planning Review of ‘an overgrown garden city, with emphasis on 8 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 the garden’. We hear such views in testimony to the 1955 Senate Select Committee, which recommended nevertheless that the ‘pastoral’ or ‘garden’ atmosphere of Canberra be perpetuated. The National Capital Development Commission (NCDC), established in 1958, endorsed this viewpoint. The NCDC’s first 5-year plan in 1959 was underpinned by four main considerations, including employment growth and safe, efficient transport. Remarkably, at least by today’s standards, the two principal ones were environmentally driven — the desire for a ‘large, parklike landscape’ particularly in central areas, and to maintain the ‘peculiarly Australian’ commitment to garden city residential standards. The Commission sustained a remarkable commitment to a park-like landscape and garden city. Within the residential areas, the NCDC stage-managed the garden city setting. Its early 1960s pamphlet Your Garden City carried information to help establish private gardens, on coping with seasonal conditions, on ideal grasses, and on the annual issue of trees and shrubs from the government’s Parks and Gardens Department. It commended The Canberra Gardener (Horticultural Society of Canberra 1948) as a source of practical advice. Gardening in Canberra became less discretionary and more a national obligation: ‘Your home is an important unit in [the Garden City] pattern, and everything that you do to surround your home with lawns and flowers, shrubs and trees, will be a particular contribution to making this city a colourful and graceful place to live in’. Garden design and plantings were evolving with the times, from the crisp decorum of the interwar years to a growing practical informality, albeit with eye-catching statements along the way that matched the modernity of new architect- designed homes (Cameron 2012). The NCDC was one of the first major Australian government planning and development agencies to incorporate a landscape planning unit. Notable figures worked in it including Harry Oakman, Richard Clough, Margaret Hendry, and Richard Gray. Key projects were outsourced. In 1965, for instance, eminent British landscape architect Dame Sylvia Crowe designed and master planned the Commonwealth Gardens as a kaleidoscope of mannered gardens, bush walks, water features, and precincts for play. Working with the British planning consultant of choice during those years, William Holford and Partners, these gardens formed the main city approach to Lake Burley Griffin — a major landscape achievement of the NCDC era. Firth (2000) provides the most authoritative account. This realised the dream of the ‘ornamental waters’ in early federal capital dreams and while named after Griffin, its configuration and foreshore treatment were departures from his conception and were instead a mix of picturesqueness and ‘benign modernism’ channelled via Holford (Vernon 2005). Lord Holford ’s 1961 recommendations set the scene for Canberra’s modern landscape development. His later report on The Growth of Canberra (Holford 1965), published after the NCDC’s The Future Canberra, argued the case for appreciating growth and open space needs at a larger scale — integrating ‘the metropolitan city’ with a ‘national park system’. The importance here relates to thinking about landscape regionally, with Canberra well placed in its own territory to integrate urban and environmental planning. Landscape considerations were conspicuously factored into the ‘territorial planning’ of the suburban new towns like Tuggeranong (McCoy 1976). A report by George Seddon (1977) provided the foundation for an integrated open space system. Masterplan for the Canberra Lake and Foreshore Development (1962), prepared by the National Capital Development Commission, appended to ‘A report on the development of Canberra for the five year period July 1962-June 1967'. Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 9 This was no ordinary ‘technical paper’, exploring the natural setting and symbolism of landscape with insight and inspiration, yet in a grounded, practical way. Interconnecting park, garden, and bush have come to be seen as intrinsic to the genius loci of the place. A recent review of the National Capital Open Space System (NCOSS), now covering over two thirds of the land area of the Australian Capital Territory, underlines the visual and environmental (specifically biodiversity importance) management challenges faced. The public landscape of Canberra today, with its best faces forward, is rich and variegated with numerous interlocking elements including the street picture of front gardens and street trees, showpiece official residences, inter-town parkways, the processional way of Anzac Parade, Commonwealth Park (host to the annual spring flower festival of Floriade), countless other formal parks and unnamed reserves, the lake and inner hills, and Canberra Nature Park. Other major planned precincts include the Australian National Botanic Gardens, National Arboretum, and Old Parliament House Gardens. All of these have their own literature, for instance, the public landscape of the national area (Firth 2001) and even the Garden of Australian Dreams, the challenging post-modern designed space incorporating various suburban referents (Weller 2001). Canberra has long had its critics — suburbia-writ- large critiques, the apotheosis of dull and wasteful Australian low-density living. James (before he became Jan) Morris wrote in 1963 of a city of ‘half-cock splendours’, ‘hideous bungalows’, ‘interminable avenues’ and ‘rectilinear egalitarian monotony’. Morris did at least get something right — still ringing true — that ‘space is the very structure of Canberra’. Governments, particularly recent ones, have not always understood Canberra’s DNA. They have privileged development objectives variously for job growth, higher density housing, or creation of a more urban, less suburban feel in the supposed interests of sustainable planning. Space standards have shrunk in new greenfield development and many observers feel that recent urban regeneration has compromised the spatial quality critical to Canberra’s sense of place. This has spurred battles between state and community to conserve landscape features and character, and called for interventions by citizens and environmental groups like the Walter Burley Griffin Society, fighting to recover the essence of the city of Walter and Marion, and indeed the Australian Garden History Society, which has directly and indirectly documented and lobbied for the historic importance of the Canberra environment over several decades (Tanner 1986; Australian Garden History Society 1997; Somers 2004). The interdependence of garden, park, and landscape unequivocally makes Canberra what it is today. Andrew MacKenzie (2012) nicely captures this in a recent conference paper. Canberra people, he argues, ‘don’t distinguish between the suburban streetscapes and the urban bush when referring to the character of the city’. Their relationship to the landscape, he continues, is ‘far more nuanced and subjectively constructed in and through interactions with residents and visitors habits, rituals and daily life experiences of walking and driving through the city and domestic activities to do with home’. The qualities of Canberra as a garden environment are manifold and interlocking, defying easy categorisation, yet very human and far from abstract. Their combination helps underpin aspirations for recognition of the city, or at least its central core, as a place of national heritage status. It is definitely a place with a fertile foundation for research, reflection, engagement, and vigilance over the next 100 years. Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning at the University of New South Wales. His most recent book is Urban Nation: Australia’s planning heritage (2010). Selected bibliography Aitken, Richard, & Looker Michael, (eds). The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens, Oxford University Press in association with the Australian Garden History Society, South Melbourne, 2002. Australian Garden History Society, The City as Garden: proceedings of the 1 8th Annual National Conference, Canberra, 25-28 July / 997, Australian Garden History Society, South Yarra, Vic., 1997. Boden, Robert, Favourite Canberra Trees, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1 993. Brennan, Frank, Canberra in Crisis: a history of land tenure and leasehold administration, Dalton Publishing Gompany Ganberra, 1971. Brown, A.J., ‘Some notes on the plan of Ganberra, Federal Gapital of Australia', Town Planning Review, 23 (2), 1952, pp. 1 63-5. Gameron, Milton, Experiments in Modern Living: scientists’ houses in Canberra 1 950- 1 970, ANU E Press, Ganberra, 20 1 2. [Ganberra] Report Explanatory of the Preliminary General Plan, Gommonwealth of Australia, Department of Home Affairs, Government Printer Melbourne, 1913. Ganberra Stories Group, My frst home in Canberra: Canberra residents’ memories of their frst homes, 1 920-1990, Ganberra Stories Group, Murrumbateman, NSW, 1994. 10 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 Coltheart, Lenore, Nursery Tales for a Garden City: the historical context of the records at Canberra’s Yarralum/a Nursery, Report prepared for the Australian Garden History Society (ACT, Monaro & Riverina Branch), December 2011. Denning, Warren, Capital City: Canberra today and tomorrow, “The Publicist", Sydney, 1938; 2nd ed., Verity Hewitt, Canberra, 1944. Firth, Dianne, The greening of Canberra: from cow paddock to urban woodland’, in Tony Dingle (ed.). The Australian City - Future/Past: proceedings of the Third Australian Planning History lUrban History Conference, Melbourne, 1 996, Monash University, Clayton, Vic., 1 997, pp.335-40. Firth, Dianne, ‘Behind the landscape of Lake Burley Griffin: landscape, waten politics and the National Capital 1899- 1964’, PhD thesis. University of Canberra, 2000. Firth, Dianne, ‘The National Triangle: a landscape designed for the nation’. Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 2 1 (2), 200 1 , pp. 1 27-36. Fischer; K.F., Canberra, Myths and Models: forces at work in the formation of the Australian capital. Institute of Asian Affairs, Hamburg, 1984. Fischer; Karl Friedhelm, ‘Viewpoint: Canberra’s centenary’. Town Planning Review, 84 (2), 20 1 3, pp.v-xiv. Freestone, Robert, Mode/ Communities: the Garden City Movement in Austro//o, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1989. Freestone, Robert, Urban Nation: Australia’s planning heritage, CSIRO Publishing in association with the Department of the Environment, Water; Heritage and the Arts and the Australian Heritage Council, Collingwood, Vic., 2010. Gibbney, Jim, Conberro / 9/3-/ 953, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1988. Gillespie, Lyall, Conberro / 820-/ 9/ 3, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1991. Gray, John E.,‘TC.G. Weston (1866-1935), horticulturist and arboriculturist: a critical review of his contribution to the establishment of the landscape foundations of the Australia’s National Capital’, PhD thesis. University of Canberra, 1999. Griffin, Dustin (ed.). The Writings of Walter Burley Griffin, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2008. Peter Harrison; Robert Ereestone (ed.), Walter Burley Griff n, landscape architect. National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1995. Headon, David, The Symbolic Role of the National Capital: from colonial argument to 21st century ideals. National Capital Authority, Canberra, 2003. Hendry, Margaret, ‘Canberra - a city within the landscape’. Landscape Planning, 6, 1 979, pp.27 1-83. Higgins, Benjamin, ‘Canberra: a garden without a city, lessons for National Capital Planning’, Community Planning Review, I (3), I95l,pp.88-I0L Hince, Bernadette, A Pryor Commitment: Canberra’s public landscape 1944-1958, ACT Landscape, Public Works and Services, Canberra, 1 994. Holford, William, A Review by Lord Holford on the Growth of Canberra, 1958-1965 and / 965-/ 972, National Capital Development Commission, Canberra, 1 965. Horticultural Society of Canberra, The Canberra Gardener, The Society, Canberra, 1 948; 1 0th ed., 20 1 0. Johnson, Donald L, Canberra and Walter Burley Griffin: a bibliography of 1876 to 1 976 and a guide to published sources, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1 980. Luffman, C. Bogue,‘The agricultural, horticultural, and sylvan features of a federal capital’, in Congress of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors, and Members of Allied Professions, to discuss questions relating to the laying out and building of the federal capital, and matters of professional interest generally, held in Melbourne during the Commonwealth Celebrations, May, / 90/, at the Institute Rooms, 178 Collins Street, J.C. Stephens, 1901, pp.43W5. McCoy, Kent, Landscape Planning for a New Australian Town, Elsevier Amsterdam, 1976. McGregor Alasdair Grand Obsessions: the life and work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, Lantern/Penguin, Melbourne, 2009. MacKenzie, Andrew, ‘The city in a fragile landscape: an exploration of the duplicitous role landscape plays in the form and function of Canberra in the twenty first century’, in Urban Transformations — Booms, Busts and Other Catastrophes: proceedings of the I I th Australasian Urban History/Planning History Conference, The University ofi Western Australia, Crawley, WA, 20 1 2. Morris, James, ‘Canberra’, Cities, Eaber and Eaber London, 1 963, pp.86-89. Murphy, G.P, Parks & Cardens in Canberra; origins and foundation, 191 1-20; thirty green years, 1921-51, Department of the Capital Territory, Canberra, 1 979 (originally published in PA. Selth (ed.), Canberra Collection, Lowden Publishing, Kilmore Vic., 1 976, pp.43-65). National Capital Development Commission, Canberra, from Limestone Plains to Garden City: the story of the National Capital’s landscape, 2nd ed.. National Capital Development Commission, Canberra, 1 985. Pryor; LD, ‘Landscape and trees in Canberra’, in The 1 95 1 Federal Congress on Regional and Town Planning: record of proceedings. Planning Institute of Australia, Canberra, 1951, pp.19-22. Pryor; LD, ‘Plant communities’ and ‘Landscape development’, in H.L White (ed.), Canberra: a nation’s capital. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1 954, pp. 1 62-77, 22 1 -3. Pryor; L.D, Trees In Canberra. Department of the Interior; Canberra, 1962. Reid, Paul, Canberra following Griff n: a design history of Australia’s national capital. National Archives of Australia, Canberra, 2002 . Reps, John W, Canberra 1912: plans and planners of the Australian Capital Competition, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Vic., 1997. Saniga, Andrew, Making Landscape Architecture in Australia, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 20 1 2. Seddon, George, An Open Space System for Canberra: a policy review prepared for the National Capital Development Comm/ss/on, NCDC Technical Paper 23, October 1977. Somers, A. (ed.). Early Ainslie Gardens: five gardens in the Corroboree Park prec/nct, ACT, Australian Garden History Society (ACT Monaro and Riverina Branch), Canberra, 2004. Sparke, Eric, Canberra 1 954-/ 980, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1 988. Tanner; Howard, ‘Gardens of the Canberra region’, Australian Garden Journal, 5 (5), 1 986, pp. 1 9 1 -2. Taylor; Ken, Canberra: city in the landscape, Halstead Press, Sydney, 2006. Turnbull, Jeff & Navaretti, PeterY, The Griff ns In Australia and India: the complete works and projects of Walter Burley Griff n and Marion Mahony Griff n,TPe Miegunyah Press, Carlton South, Vic., 1998. Vernon, Christopher; ‘An Emerald City? Water and the colonial picturesque at the National Capital, 1901-1964’, Austro/i'an Humanities Review, 36, July 2005), online. Vernon, Christopher; ‘Canberra: where landscape is pre-eminent’, in David LA. Gordon (ed.), PlanningTwentieth-Century Capital Cities, Routledge, New York, 2006, pp. 1 30-49. Ward, Andrew, Assessment of Garden City Planning Principles in the ACT, ACT Government, Environment ACT Heritage Unit, Canberra, 2000. Watson, Anne (ed.). Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griff n — America, Australia, India, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney, 1998. Weller; Richard, ‘The National Museum, Canberra, and its Garden of Australian Dreams’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 21 ( I ), 200 1 , pp.66-84. Wigmore, Lionel, The Long View: a history of Canberra, Australia’s national capital, EW Cheshire, Melbourne, 1963. Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/lVLay/June 2013 11 Planting a vision: Canberra's Yarralumla Nursery records Plantation at the temporary nursery at Acton (1921), where work continued for many years after the establishment of the permanent nursery at Yarralumla in 1914. National Archives of Australia: A3560, 484 With Australian Garden History Society assistance, the records of Canberra's Yarralumla Nursery have now been conserved, digitised, and interpreted for the benefit of future generations. A precious legacy For one hundred years the garden city of Canberra has been nourished and shaped by Yarralumla Nursery. The Nursery’s records reveal it all, from the first forestry work to the landscaping of parks, public works, and streets, and from the initial testing of grains and fodder crops to the blooming of suburban gardens. Prime among these records are the systems started by the two towering figures in the planting of Canberra, Charles Weston, in charge from 1913—27 and Lindsay Pryor, from 1944—58. The scientific and historical evidence contained in Weston’s plant cards and Pryor’s ledgers is now accessible worldwide, thanks to the work of the ACT, Monaro & Riverina branch of the Australian Garden History Society and the website established by the ACT Government Archives. The meticulous digitisation of these records — the originals still operational and until 2011 housed in the Nursery’s original corrugated iron office — is a great gift for the centenary of the national capital. As vulnerable as they are valuable, these irreplaceable records of the planting of Canberra can now be conserved in archival care. On 5 May 1913 when Weston took up his post as the man who would create the garden for the newly designed garden city, he wrote out the first plant cards recording the seeds he had brought with him on the long journey by rail and road from Sydney. For the next thirty years the handwritten plant cards recorded the source of every batch of seed acquired. The ledgers are those where, from the 1 940s, Pryor began recording the seeds he collected from around the world, as well as those he foraged from the streets and parks Weston had planted. Until Weston retired in 1927, the plant cards were a careful account of the propagation, cultivation, location, and trial results of the trees, shrubs, flowers, and even pasture grasses the Nursery supplied to the city and its countryside. They even show the planting destinations — and thereby hang many Nursery tales. 12 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/ June 2013 Art and science Perhaps the most compelling aspect of these extraordinary records is their evidence of the role science played in realising the artistic intent of Walter Burley Griffin’s design, shaping Canberra as both garden city and bush capital. They are scientific treasure but they are also a rich cultural artefact, tracing the realisation of an imagined civic landscape. The purpose of the records maintained by Weston from 1913 and by Pryor and his team from 1944 was scientific and operational. The careful recording of data on experimentation and propagation in these two periods retains its importance to botanical research and to forestry and horticulture. The faded cards in their old wooden drawers and the well-thumbed ledgers are plain workaday records. They are a far remove from Marion Mahony Griffin’s magnificent renderings of the winning design for the national capital, their aesthetic appeal signalling their unique historical value. Those drawings — the originals now heart- stoppingly presented in the major Design 29 exhibition at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra — are rightly considered among our national treasures. They remain a potent and beautiful expression of the Griffins’ ideals for a city to foster a civic democracy and lead a nation. The records at Yarralumla Nursery may appear unprepossessing, but with their associated planting plans and records of experimentation they are the essential complement to these drawings. Considered together, the plant records and design drawings suggest the marriage of art and science that was the essence of the Griffins’ approach to their greatest work, the plan for the ‘Federal City’ of Australia. Together they enable us better to grasp the Griffins’ intention that this would be a city not only in but of its landscape. It is an extraordinary idea to grasp — that the layout and buildings and all the life of the city would somehow flow from and through the topography and flora of the site and the climate of the region, and express the geographical and geopolitical relations of the place to the world. From the first, Wbston gleaned seed from the local region and interstate, as well as ordering huge quantities from commercial nurseries around the Data on experimentation and propagation were carefully recorded on cards (by Weston) and in now well-thumbed ledgers (by Pryor and team from 1 944). Also shown are seed collections, gathered locally and interstate since 1913. Courtesy ACT Government, Yarralumla Nursery Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 13 Aerial view of Yarralumla Nursery in the 1 920s, photographed by William James Mildenhall (1891-1962). National Library of Australia: nla.pic-anl 1030057-79 world. Those passionate botanical expeditionists Walter and Marion Griffin were also keen collectors, exploring the outskirts of Sydney and Melbourne as well as each state botanical garden. In the Canberra region Weston collected both indigenous species and the many exotics available from a century of pastoral occupation. Intensive experimentation by Weston’s small group until 1927 and then by Lindsay Pryor and his talented team in 1944—58 trialled species for successful adaptation to the site. Today Australia’s national capital is a unique biota, where species selected from all over the planet have adapted to take their place. Yarralumla Nursery’s plant cards and ledgers show how this happened, through collection, gifts, exchanges, and experimentation which link Australia to a century of world botany, the results of considerable biodiversity significance. The website publication of these records and of the Griffins’ work is the first time in their hundred years that they can be experienced together as a partnership of art and science, as the expression and interpretation of an ideal city, and of the deep connections of nature and culture. Nursery tales Garden historians know what fascinating gems can be unearthed in the layers of history that shape Australian landscapes. Where trails lead back to Canberra’s founding era, the detail on Weston’s plant cards makes this pursuit particularly fruitful. As well as their clues to the city’s past, present, and future, there are stories to arrest attention across Australia. For instance, Weston’s plant cards show how Canberra’s famous free plant issue scheme grew, Topsy-like, from the first exchanges between the Nursery, its neighbourhood, and the nation. In the custom of gardeners everywhere, Yarralumla Nursery was engaged in giving as well as getting and growing. The early plant cards are full of tales to tell. For instance, a little detective work will tell if your electorate was among the many to receive plants from Yarralumla Nursery in the 1920s, when these were often supplied to members of parliament. Are any of the 36 trees and plants sent to the new MHR for Kooyong John Latham in July 1923 flourishing in Melbourne today? Or the 31 trees and plants sent across the continent to Western Australian Senator Edmund Drake-Brockman? Whether through gifts to parliamentarians or their constituencies, these leafy ambassadors promoted the Herculean national work of creating a seat of government on the windy and remote Limestone Plains. And what of the huge and continual consignments to Prime Minister Billy Hughes? On 3 August 1922 alone, pairs of Atlas cedar, cork oak, kurrajong, buttonwood, and Irish strawberry tree, and trios of Chinese elm and western yellow pine were despatched to him. Perhaps this small forest was planted out in his electorate of Bendigo — or perhaps not. Hughes cannily changed his electorate back to North Sydney before the federal election that year and the family had bought a brand new house in the Sydney suburb of Lindfield. In February 1923, after Hughes was succeeded as prime minister by Stanley Melbourne Bruce, his Yarralumla Nursery consignments continued. A glimpse today at the Hughes’ Nelson Road place shows the destination of some of the trees and perhaps there are families in both electorates who can trace their trees too. Yarralumla Nursery’s plant cards and ledgers ... link Australia to a century of world botany As the Depression closed in, so did the national plant largesse. When Labor Opposition MHR Frank Forde applied in 1932 for five dozen tulip bulbs, presumably for his Capricornia electorate rather than his Rockhampton home, he was denied. So was the new Teachers College at Armidale, NSW, seeking trees for their bare grounds in February 1934, and MHR J.A. Lawson a month later when he asked for 1000 trees to distribute in his Blue Mountains electorate. The Goulburn Orphanage was more fortunate, its original appeal for tulip bulbs to Prime Minister Lyons shown to have been mislaid before the policy cutback. 14 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 Gympie’s town hall was also squeezed in when the council advised its request — twelve months before the ban — had been ignored and three almonds, two flowering plums, and an Arizona cypress were despatched to Queensland in July 1934. Bathurst Council was also fortunate, the city’s Memory Drive deemed within the new rules in April 1934. When the Armidale arboretum was turned down the next month, the local MHR vehemently protested that Yarralumla Nursery plants were ‘one of the few advantages which the suffering taxpayers can get from Canberra’. Now officially as well as popularly recognised as drawn from Canberra’s ‘Garden City’ ideal, from the 1930S Yarralumla Nursery’s plant issue scheme has applied only to new homes in Canberra. From 1971 these also included flats and townhouses, proliferating in the construction of medium and high density housing under the National Capital Development Commission. Canberra’s plant issue scheme might be unique and is certainly rare, as was pointed out by the New York State architect and planner who sought to establish a similar scheme and could find no US precedent. A century after Weston provided those first free plants the householders in Canberra’s newest suburbs are no less part of the history of the Nursery than the very first recipients. But many a tale is still to be told of where all those stripling Dust jacket of the trees are today. With the help of those online edition of Lindsay plant cards, Australians everywhere can share in the forensic fun of finding clues to the fate of their garden city trees. For so long, an understanding of the value of the Yarralumla Nursery records has depended on an appreciation of their horticultural amenity and scientific value. Now they are at our fingertips their stories can be ours, and their value in understanding the ideals that founded our nation and its capital can at last be explored. Lenore Coltheart is a Canberra-based historian. This article is based on her report Nursery Tales for a Garden City, prepared for the Australian Garden History Society (ACT, Monaco & Riverina Branch), December 2011. The digitised records of the Yarralumla Nursery are available through the ACT government archives at www.archives.act.gov.au/home/yarralumla_nursery. records Design 29: creating a capital is on at the National Archives of Australia, March-September 20 1 3 http://design29.naa.gov.au/ Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 15 Some garden references in the Sydney office library of Walter Burley Griffin and Aiarion Aiahony Griffin These four books published in the five years leading up to World War One were all popular titles aimed at promoting appreciation and garden use of Australian plants and each was held in the Griffins' library. A collection of books, principally from the Sydney office library of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, tells much about the design practice and interest in Australian flora of this influential couple. Walter Burley Griffin (1876—1937) and Marion Mahony Griffin (1871 — 1961) settled in Australia during May 1914. They rented a house at Greenwich in Sydney, but as the newly appointed Federal Director of Design and Construction, Walter’s office for his Canberra responsibilities was located in Melbourne. To be with Marion he commuted by overnight train. Griffin as Director had the right to private practice. The Griffins soon had private practice rooms in both Sydney and Melbourne, with Marion, Roy Lippincott, and Roy’s wife Genevieve (Walter’s sister) working in the Sydney premises, and Walter and George Elgh in the Melbourne chambers. Marion and the Lippincotts moved to Melbourne during 1917. Marion moved back to Sydney in 1921, to Castlecrag on Middle Harbour, where Walter join her in 1925. The Griffins’ stamp declared that Walter Burley Griffin had architecture and landscape architecture practices in Sydney, Chicago, and Melbourne. This banner was stamped as a letterhead on their stationary, and was also used to mark the flyleaf of all office reference books. Many of these books travelled with them from Chicago, including a textbook from Walter’s high school days and books acquired during his university days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Some books from the Sydney office library survive in the care of the Eric Nicholls Collection. In 1921, Eric Nicholls (1902—1965) joined the Melbourne office of Walter Burley Griffin, Architect and Landscape Architect, and quickly became an invaluable associate, such that by 1930 the Griffins’ municipal incinerator projects were accredited to the partnership of Griffin & Nicholls. The titles of the Melbourne office library — if it indeed ever existed — were dispersed long ago. However, books with the Griffin office stamp do appear from time to time in the market place, or are already in various public or private library collections. Amongst the surviving forty-six books of the Eric Nicholls Collection, landscape architecture titles for America, Europe, and Asia occur. And as well as botany and horticultural books there were books on architectural history (especially during the mediaeval period), travel books, town planning in Australia and China, anthropology and zoology, legends, nursery rhymes, and fairy stories. 16 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/ June 2013 Sadly, few references on Australian flora remain. Evidence suggests that the Griffins greatly enlarged their knowledge of Australian flora through fieldwork, so much so that during 1916 a landscape design for an Australian Botanic Garden was drawn up for Newman College in Melbourne. This garden, if implemented, was to have a dozen species of Australian ground cover plants, and flowering trees and shrubs grouped to reveal the sequence of the colours of the rainbow. Unfortunately nursery companies of the day were unable to supply the Australian plants that the Griffins had chosen. Marion provided a later scheme that was implemented, its straight pathways and roundabouts still visible and much used. An example of a book in private hands with the Griffins’ stamp on the flyleaf is a hardbound copy R.H. Cambage’s ‘Notes on the botany of the interior of New South Wales’, from the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales (1909). In this substantial work, Cambage explains that: ‘In following my duties as a Mining Surveyor in the Western District, opportunities have been afforded of observing the flora in certain parts of the interior of New South Wales. I do not claim to have made a complete botanical survey, but have only noted the principal trees in passing along.’ So this really constitutes an early flora of semi-arid New South Wales, written by a botanist who worked at the Sydney Botanic Gardens and so is presumably seeing the trees from a cultural and aesthetic as well as a scientific perspective. The National Library of Australia in Canberra has in its collection two books with the Griffins’ stamp on the flyleaves. In addition, the original handwritten lettering ‘Walter B Griffin, U of I’ appears in George William Jones, A DrillBook in Trigonometry (New York, 1896). ‘WB Griffin, U of F and Griffin’s lodging address in Champaign appears in Nathan Clifford Ricker, Elementary Graphic Statics and the Construction of Trussed Roofs (4th ed.. New York, 1897). These two were textbooks during Griffin’s time at Engineering Hall from 1895 to 1899 and Ricker was Walter’s highly respected and greatly admired Professor of Architecture. While at the University of Illinois Walter took on two extra elective subjects in horticulture. Relevant to that career, Asa Gray’s The Elements of Botany for Beginners and Schools (New York, 1887) has the Griffins’ office stamp as well as ‘Walter Burley Griffin, OPHS [i.e. Oak Park High School], Elmhurst High School’ lettered in a teenage hand. So this textbook was at the forefront of Griffin’s love for nature and for gardening. Asa Gray (1810— 1888) was the Professor of Botany at Harvard University. Previously in 1876 he had published essays on Darwinism. Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858—1954) became an important assistant to Gray, and published significant cyclopedias on American horticulture. In the ‘Magic of America (1940—49) — Marion’s themed reverie on their lives together — she noted that Walter had a superb encyclopaedic memory. During walks in the bush, she claimed, Walter could identify Australian native species from recall of Bailey’s cyclopedia, plants that they may have never before encountered. The strongly drawn black line drawings of species in Gray and in Bailey presumably enhanced Walter’s phenomenal feats of memory. The office libraries also had a role in the development of their architectural and landscape designs. In addition they maintained photo folders on a range of subjects, each containing cuttings, postcards, photos, magazine overruns, and so on, appropriate to the photo folder file subject heading. In her memoirs Marion observed that Walter would ‘as usual’ produce a diagram on the back of a small envelope that he would present to her for development. The line diagram would be a layering of underlying compositional structures, the patterns drawn from the parti of precedents relevant to the functional and symbolic programme on hand. Together they would develop the whole design from this beginning. Marion and Walter admired the earlier architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838—1886), who also had a similar design method. It can be strongly supposed that the Griffins were familiar with Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (New York, 1888). Indeed, the centrefold of this book illustrates significant motifs Griffin emulated in the design of the Newman College building during 1915—18. Van Rensselaer described Richardson producing diagrams no bigger than the palm of the hand. He would present such a diagram to ‘his executive’, with advice about the office book and photo folder references. Richardson then guided the teamwork. As an example of a significant source for the Griffins, Marion in ‘Magic’ praises Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826) in her very first paragraph. A number of monographs on Jefferson were published in America during the last decade of the nineteenth century, for example, the Eunk & Wagnall, John R Eoley, The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia (New York, 1900). Indeed, Walter’s architectural oeuvre also featured motifs he deliberately derived from Jefferson’s architecture Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 17 and ideas at his house Monticello and at the University of Virginia. It is interesting to see that in Jefferson’s scheme for the garden at Monticello paths were laid out along the descending contours of the little hill, the planting species sketched and named in location, with a listing of all the plants down one side of the drawing. The Griffins adapted this kind of layout for their many schemes for residential gardens in America and Australia. The Griffins’ enthusiasm for learning about Australian plants and gardens was soon shown when they first came to Melbourne together in June 1914. The Melbourne Punch gossip columnist recorded that the Griffins stayed at the Oriental Hotel. But because little progress on Canberra was being made at the bureaucratic level, the Griffins instead visited the Melbourne Botanic Gardens every day, to observe, sketch, and note Australian species. William Guilfoyle (1840—1912) was the acknowledged designer of these Gardens and author of Australian Plants: suitable for gardens, parks, timber reserves, etc. (Melbourne, 19 ii), a title held in the Griffins’ Sydney office library. In another instance Marion wrote that Walter befriended an Indigenous elder whom he accompanied on excursions into the bush to examine plant life. Marion, during the years in Castlecrag, drew the native trees, and also journeyed a number of times to Tasmania, and left the world with exquisite portraits of Australian forest species. The Griffins’ landscaping legacy resonates with the work of earlier great Australian landscapists, such as Guilfoyle. Australian species provide wonderful garden materials that inspire our confidence in the characteristics of diverse Australian landscapes. Dr Jeffrey Turnbull is a Senior Fellow of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne where he completed his PhD thesis The Architecture of Newman College’ (2004). With PeterY Navaretti he published The Griffins in Australia and India: the complete works and projects of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griff n ( 1 998). Books from the Sydney office library of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin This bibliography on botanical and horticultural topics has been selected from forty-six books once part of the Griffin & Nicholls’ Sydney office, from the collection held by Marie Nicholls. Other books (not listed here) range across architectural histories by James Fergusson, on planning in Chicago and Canberra, on architecture in Japan, on cities in China, on European mediaeval architecture by Henry Adams and W. Eden Nesfield amongst others. Australian botanical and horticultural books Effie E. Baker Australian Wild Flowers, T- & H. Hunter Melbourne, [1914]. William Robert Guilfoyle, Austro/ian Plants Suitable for Gardens, Parks, Timber Reserves, etc., Whitcombe & Tombs Limited, Melbourne, [1911]. Amy E. Mack, A Bush Calender, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1911. Edward Edgar Pescott, The Native Flowers of Victoria, George Robertson & Company Pty Ltd, Melbourne, [1914]. American botanical and horticultural books Nathaniel Lord Britton & Addison Brown, An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions from Newfoundland to the parallel of the southern boundary of Virginia, and from the Atlantic Ocean westward to the 1 02nd Meridian, in three volumes. Vol. Ill Apocynaceae to Compositae - Dogbark to Thistle’, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1898. Thomas C. Chamberlin & Rollin D. Salisbury, A College Textbook of Geology, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1909. Asa Gray, The Elements of Botany for Beginners and Schools, American Book Company, New York, 1 887. Asa Gray, Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, American Book Company, New York, 1889. Harriet L. Keeler Our Northern Shrubs and How to Identify Them: a handbook for the nature-lover, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1903. Gifford Pinchot, A Primer of Forestry, US Department of Agriculture ‘farmer’s Bulletin No. 173’, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1909. Rogers, Julia Ellen E., The Tree Book, a popular guide to knowledge of the trees of North America and the their uses and cultivation; with sixteen plates in color and one hundred and sixty in black and white from photographs by A. Radclyffe Dugmore, Doubleday Page & Company, New York, 1905. Mabel Cabot Sedgwick, assisted by Robert Cameron, The Garden Month by Month: describing the appearance, color, dates of bloom, height and cultivation of all desirable hardy herbaceous perennials for the formal or wild garden, with additional lists of aquatics, vines, ferns, etc., Erederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 1907. H.J. Wheeler The Liming of Soils, US Department of Agriculture ‘farmer’s Bulletin No 77’, Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1905. European botanical and horticultural books Charles Holmes (ed.). The Gardens of England in the Midland and Eastern Counties.The Studio, London, 1 908. W. Robinson, The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds, John Murray, London, 1902. Walter R Wright, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Gardening, j.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1913. Asian botanical and horticultural books Ernst Boerschmann, Picturesque China: architecture and landscape, a Journey through twelve provinces,T. fisher Unwin, London, n.d. [c.1909] Glenn Brown, European and Japanese Gardens: papers read before the American Institute of Architects, Henry T Coates & Company, Philadelphia, 1902. Josiah Conder Landscape Gardening in Japan, Kelly & Walsh, Tokio, 1893. Edward S. Morse, joponese Homes and their Surroundings, Ticknor & Company, Boston, 1 886. WAUn^R BURlZY GRr™ ARCHTTSCr.LANDSCAPf: ARCHJTTCT tl^DNEY. - M “ 1. " ..OilCACOu “ p ‘^hCL&OURNE.Il 18 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/lMay/June 2013 Looking for Charles Weston Working with Canberra's designed landscape prompted John Gray to investigate the foundational plantings of Charles Weston and to promote their significance. British-trained horticulturist and arboriculturist Thomas Charles George Weston (1866—1935) was one of Canberra’s pioneers. His work was integral to the building of the national capital. Weston pioneered the city’s landscape development under very difficult circumstances and his work was fundamental to the success of the celebrated plan for the city by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. I worked in Canberra for many years and during the period from the mid-1970s working for the National Capital Development Commission, Walter Burley Griffin was the key figure for a lot of the NCDC staff Quite a few believed Griffin had been responsible for all that had been achieved. I would listen and think: ‘they are forgetting the work that was achieved in the first place and they are forgetting the work that Weston did’. That prompted me to take an interest in Weston. I felt it was time for Weston (and others) to have due recognition. When I was appointed Director of Landscape Architecture at the NCDC (1980—88), I decided I would give the staff of the Commission a bit of a belting about Weston. One of the things I did was compile some of the early photos of Weston’s original plantings from a few years after they were planted, then asked my staff to go out and photograph those same places in the present day. We put the images together in an exhibition and (with the addition of some wine and cheese) they all thought that was wonderful. Coming out of the staff exhibition was the publication Canberra, from Limestone Plains to Garden City: the story of the National Capital’s landscape (1985). Left: John Gray in his Canberra study holding a photographic portrait of horticulturist and arboriculturist Thomas Charles George Weston (1866-1935). Photo: Christina Dyson Right: Portrait of Weston at his retirement in 1927. Courtesy John Gray Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 19 Canberra, from Limestone Plains to Garden City ( 1 985) by the National Capital Development Commission was one of the results of Gray's enthusiastic promotion of research into key players (other than Walter Burley Griffin) in the development of Canberra. Another outcome was detailed research on the work of forester and botanist Lindsay Dixon Pryor (1915-1998) as Superintendent of the Parks and Gardens section, Department of the Interior; by Bernadette Hince: A Pryor Commitment: Canberra’s public landscape 1944-1958, (1994). The book talks about Weston, about Lindsay Pryor (a forester), and Griffin, and achieved a greater recognition of Weston’s contribution. Also important was Weston’s research and experimentation. Everyone since Weston has been able to build on that research and make good decisions. That is what Griffin really didn’t understand about Weston, who was following a traditional horticultural route, saying: ‘I am going out to test these plants in this soil and climatic conditions and whatever comes out best I will use’. Griffin didn’t seem to understand that. Weston was trialling everything from an early stage, including local eucalypts and other local vegetation. The Westbourne Woods Arboretum is one example of his research and experimentation, and is divided into distinct areas (including northern hemisphere hardwoods, deciduous trees, coniferous species, and an area for trees native to Australia). Though Weston was testing a large amount of native plant material he had reservations about this, and even today there are problems with its use, particularly trees. When I retired I decided to do something more about recognition of Weston’s work in Canberra. I knew about Weston’s papers from Canberra- based historian Greg Murphy, who had found them in an old shed down at Acton and had them transferred into the National Archives. Murphy had written a few papers about Weston but they were largely technical articles in which the context was not well explained. So I set to and began my quest to find out more about Weston. Most of the archival research I did in Australia. Beyond Weston’s papers in the National Archives and other Australian collections, my research also took me to the British Library, the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library, and other national monuments and records centres in England and Scotland. I did a fair amount of research on properties at which Weston worked. Weston had been born and grew up at Poyle (near Slough, just west of today’s Heathrow Airport) and went to school in nearby Colnbrook. He was only about 13 or 14 when he began his apprenticeship at Poyle Manor, but unfortunately the garden has long since gone. Lrom there I tracked Weston to another garden, Ditton Park in Buckinghamshire, close to Windsor Castle. It is a wonderful old building and it was, in Weston’s time, the residence of the Dowager Duchess of Buccleuch. Almost nothing is known of the seven years of Weston’s life at Ditton Park. Lrom there I traced Weston up to Scotland, to Drumlanrig Castle, Dunfriesshire, a seat of the Duke of Buccleuch. Lrom Drumlanrig he came to Sydney in 1896. Drumlanrig Castle was where Weston was best exposed to landscape from the grand scale of forestry down to bedding plants. He was promoted there and became a foreman working under David Thomson, one of the great Victorian-era horticulturists. Lorestry was being pursued at Drumlanrig and in that district, which I believe was Weston’s first exposure to large-scale forestry. There was a great deal of detailed horticulture going on there as well — extensive bedding displays where he was developing his great horticulture skills. that was why Weston was successful in Canberra— because he knew horticulture, he understood soils, the interrelationship between soils and plants, and how to propagate Looking in detail at Drumlanrig, I think it was mostly the wooded areas that were an influence. However, the actual bedding displays were really important to Weston’s development as a horticulturist, and that was why he was successful in Canberra — because he knew horticulture, he 20 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/ June 2013 John Gray recalls his own career I was born in Sydney, on 7 May 1930. A significant influence on my life was my family’s move to Lindfield on Sydney’s North Shore when I was still at primary school. Our house was on the edge of a large area of natural bushland — the Davidson State Recreation area. I would get home from school and, attracted to the outdoors, would immediately be out there. I went to Sydney University in 1 948, only a few years after the war The forests of NSW had been over-cut during World War II and there had been very little attention to sustainable management. A reaction to that was to train a lot of young people to become foresters to manage in the future the forests in a more sustainable way. That was how I went into forestry and that led into landscape architecture, which was a bit of an accidental thing. I was working in NSW and then I came to Canberra where I was working in forestry research. When a job came up in the Parks and Gardens section of the Department of the Interior I thought it seemed rather interesting, so I applied for and got the job. Dr Lindsay Pryor had been the Superintendent of Parks and Gardens. I didn’t however work for Lindsay, I worked for David Shoobridge (191 3-2000) who was also a forester At this time the NCDC was just starting off and they used the Parks and Gardens Section as their landscape construction agent, which began to give me a feel for landscape architecture and design. My first major project was the landscaping of the foreshores of Lake Burley Griffin. This prompted me to go to California to pursue a Masters in landscape architecture, supported by a Commonwealth Public Service Scholarship. Apparently I mounted a very good argument to get this. I returned from California to teach at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now University of Canberra) for a few years and was, in 1 974, tempted to join the NCDC. I was already very familiar with the work they were doing and there were a lot of interesting challenges there at the time, particularly in the rural areas of the ACT where the NCDC was starting to invest money — in recreation areas, picnic areas, and so on. The NCDC lasted for 30 years and had a big influence over the landscape development of Canberra in that period when the government wanted to transfer public servants to Canberra and expand its population. The I970s-80s was quite an exciting period, when a tremendous proportion of the infrastructure of Canberra was built. I retired from the NCDC on I I November in 1 988. understood soils, the interrelationship between soils and plants, and how to propagate. This knowledge all proved to be of great value in Canberra. Weston first visited the federal capital site in 19 1 1 and 1912. At the time he was Head Gardener at Federal Government House in Sydney, a position he had held since 1908, working under Joseph Maiden, one of Australia’s most respected botanists. The Commonwealth Government took possession of the Federal Capital Territory on i January 1911. Cabinet had approved several things that would be done in 19 1 1 and one was to construct a nursery. That is how Weston found his way to Canberra, finally officially transferring there from Sydney in 1913, to take up the position of Officer-in- Charge, Afforestation Branch, Federal Capital Territory. It was a very significant event and the nursery responded to an initial desire for conservation, rather than landscaping the Federal Capital. Prior to deciding on this nursery the Commonwealth had determined that a hills surrounding the proposed city site, partially stripped by settlers, would have to be revegetated. So the first step was really about reforestation. This really was significant because throughout the history of Canberra the surrounding hills and broad scale landscape formed an important setting for the national capital, which is what the Griffins were proposing from the other side of the world. Weston’s next projects were the amenity plantings within the city in 1921. There had been hardly anything going on towards building the city until after the First World War. There were rows between the government officials and Griffin that Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfriesshire, where Weston was exposed to forestry and horticulture on a grand scale, and where Weston made the decision to emigrate to Australia. It was Drumlanrig that gave John Gray a sense of the themes that influenced Weston in Canberra. © RCAHMS. Licensor www. rcahms.gov.uk Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 21 During the period ofWeston’s initial visits to Canberra, new Administrative Offices for the Home Affairs Department, Canberra were completed and occupied (by August 1912), following a period of drawing and clerical work being conducted in calico tents. Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Home Affairs, Annual Report of Lands and Survey Branch, 1913. Above right: Thomas and Minimia Weston (centre) with their three daughters (front and in car) and John Hobday (standing behind Weston), Yarralumla Nursery office, c. 1 923 Courtesy ACT Government, Yarralumla Nursery led in turn to a Royal Commission in 1916. In 1921 the Federal Government created a Federal Capital Advisory Committee and one of the first tasks carried out when they first met in January 1921 was the commencement of urban planting by Weston. The Griffin plan was already in place, and Weston was picking up on that, undertaking street tree plantings on streets that were part of the Griffins’ plan. By then Weston knew a lot about the site. He understood more about the soils, the problems of wind, the frost, and so on. And it was in 1921 that City Hill and a large shelter-belt called Haig Park were planted. Haig Park and also Commonwealth Avenue were his reaction to the problem of wind at the federal capital site — he lived in a two-roomed hut in Acton that was exposed to the prevailing winds. What made Weston so interesting as a subject of research ? I take an interest in people who are the quiet achievers and whose work has tended to be forgotten. This attracted me to Weston. A lot of people had tried to downplay Weston, Griffin included. I feel that when people have made such an outstanding contribution — as Weston did — that this should be well recognised. My interest in Weston was a reaction to the tendency in the NCDC for the people to think Walter Burley Griffin had done it at all. Griffin on the other hand — from the research that I did — was very unsuccessful in achieving anything in Canberra in terms of horticulture and, generally, in terms of getting development going. One of my criticisms of Griffin, which I explain in my doctoral thesis, was that he failed to develop a good relationship with Weston. Any landscape architect knows that if you are going to be successful as a designer you have to understand the plants you are going to use. Griffin was not doing that with Weston. Weston had a tremendous horticultural background and he had built up a great knowledge of horticulture. The role of the landscape architect was to try and tap that information and Griffin wasn’t doing that. While the Griffins’ plan is iconic, Weston’s work contributes very strongly to Canberra’s sense of place. Weston’s work in the 1910s, which was related more to reforestation, has had a very big impact on Canberra. It has affected the way in which people live in this city. Walking groups, conservation groups — all of those activities are going on close to the city and are a part of living in Canberra today because a ‘natural’ landscape exists in such close proximity. That was the beginning ofWeston’s work. It is an achievement. Westons contribution- made under very difficult circumstances— was absolutely amazing I Still admire Weston’s work, having worked and lived with it closely for many years. Some of his plantings, like those in the Parliamentary Triangle, remain wonderful parts of Canberra. Weston’s contribution — made under very difficult circumstances — was absolutely amazing. John Gray is a retired landscape architect and academic. He continues to promote the contribution of Charles Weston to Canberra’s designed landscape. John Gray’s doctoral thesis is ‘TC.G. Weston (1866- 1935), horticulturist and arboriculturist: a critical review of his contribution to the establishment of the landscape foundations of Australia’s National Gapital’, University of Ganberra, 1999. The National Library of Australia has interviewed John Gray for its oral history collection (interviewer Margaret Park, 20 1 I ).The interview and a transcript are available online, http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn5598847 22 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 The National Arboretum Canberra: an historie eoncept with an Australian twist The opening of the National Arboretum Canberra on 1 February 2013 represented a magnificent revival of an older concept in gardening, with its 250-hectare site fulfilling — in part — the Griffins' objective to have an international arboretum near this site in their original plan. The concept of an arboretum is itself i8o years old. But its roots are tangled with those of botanic gardens, public parks, and forestry research stations. And to continue the tree metaphor, its trunk and branches relate to public amenity, personal vanity, and simple curiosity. A form of mania to own and grow — and boast about — one’s collections of ‘exoticks’ began roughly in the middle of the eighteenth century and accelerated into the nineteenth century. Initially this was often for the curiosity value of flowering plants, but as ‘big’ men with big estates became more involved in the race it included big trees. The idea collided with the beginnings of concepts embodying city amenity, parks and tree-lined streets, quite novel ideas until the late eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century arboreta as forms of research stations, were embraced by the newly developing professional scientific foresters. The word ‘arboretum’, though derived from the Latin arbor for tree, is only relatively recent. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first usage was in 1833, by John Claudius Loudon in his Gardener s Magazine meaning generally ‘a place grown with trees’, but more specifically ‘a place devoted to the cultivation and exhibition of rare trees; a botanical tree garden’. Early botanical gardens, as we know them today, emerged from the concept of ‘physick’ or medicinal plant gardens usually associated from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries with European universities or monasteries. In an attempt to make ordered collections of all known plants. Cork oak plantation at the National Arboretum Canberra showing signs of having been harvested for a number of uses since the early 1 920s. Photo: Linda Muldoon Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 23 View across the National Arboretum Canberra. Photo; Linda Muldoon during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ‘systematic gardens’ were developed by those studying plants. The idea of public botanical gardens really only emerged in the late eighteenth century and especially during the early nineteenth century. Private gardens with specialised garden The Derby Arboretum, designed by J.C. Loudon and illustrated here in his Gardener’s Magazine (October I 840). PLAN ::i 3 DERBY jmiQRETUK ■ r* pwi k fcMuJb.* lliI i.ULzr ^4 f,f r4T..:,.nk i TVr^rn n f lu ika Srrin f LWhHl ^ IB i*! I fa 1 I EtaHM. KiMa I Mc'iU UkUQ li nnfci i lM iit i 1^ 'x ikc rninBTnfakkapanlaJ siy! »»» ir*^W"^F**** I?* fc? 1 AirU. Htilu. m Mub fsMA. h.B.U. bB at Mniljiumi: f luu.. Fir arw r compartments were popularised by British garden designer Humphry Repton, who in 1815 for example, designed gardens for Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire, including a ‘pomarium’ (apples) and ‘rosarium’ (roses). In 1838 Loudon published his eight-volume Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, which included four volumes of plates depicting specimen trees. The concept of a pleasure ground or a park for recreation by ordinary people became conceivable for the non-aristocratic classes, when they in fact had leisure time. The industrialist Joseph Strutt wished to create a public park for the people of Derby and in 1 840 the Derby Arboretum, commissioned from Loudon, was opened to the public. This small site (14 acres or just under 6 ha) had a major impact on the concept of public parks not only in Britain but around the Western world. Frederick Law Olmsted for instance, the designer of New York’s Central Park, visited it in 1859 before creating his grand works. In correspondence between Loudon and Strutt during the design, Loudon suggested that an arboretum (of trees only) would be easier to maintain and more beneficial than a garden with many bedding plants. Arboretums (or arboreta) found ready acceptance in both private and public domains during the nineteenth century. Their widespread creation coincided with a great age of plant exploration when plant hunters roamed the remote regions of North America and Asia sending enormous cargoes of new plants (new to them at least) back to nurseries like Loddiges and Veitches in London, but also to major nurseries in Australia. It became highly fashionable for wealthy owners to collect trees and plant not only outdoors, with specialised collections such as 24 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 IK pinetums, but also in sheltered environments for plant groups such as palms (palmetums). But by the end of the nineteenth century, as forestry went from a trade to a scientific-based profession, the idea of arboreta moved into a new phase. Arboreta became research stations for public and private forestry enterprises. In 1925 this concept became codified when Dr Thomas Chipp, Deputy Director of the Royal Botanic Garden Kew and Secretary to the British Empire Forestry Conference, published a manual for this purpose. Chipp emphasised that arboreta were places where tree research should take place. Later the International Union of Forest Research Organisations attempted to develop a standard format for trials in arboreta. Many Australian arboreta were created for these purposes. Among the oldest was that created in 1875 country of central South Australia, near Jamestown, to test suitable tree species. Australian species such as Eucalyptus were trialled at Bundaleer Forest alongside exotic ashes, oaks, sycamores, elms, walnuts, poplars, and willows. Most colonial and later state forestry departments and commissions created arboreta around Australia — some still exist though most have become amenity spaces rather than trial grounds. Around Australia many private and public arboreta thrive. Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s winning design for Canberra included an arboretum, very close to that now opened, at the foot of Black Mountain. Walter Burley Griffin had attended a major science congress at which the concept of Gondwana was discussed and so the layout of his arboretum was to reflect that idea. Meanwhile Charles Weston, who had been appointed Afforestation Officer, had begun to plant out an arboretum to assist him in species selection for the new plantings for Canberra. The two argued at some length about Australian versus introduced species. Weston’s central arboretum is now Westbourne Woods (leased by Royal Canberra Golf Club) and one hundred years on still reflects the character of its early plantings. As well as Weston, his successors up to Lindsay Pryor’s time in the 1940s and 1950s, created a number of specific ‘species plots’ and minor arboreta, in their search for useful trees for public and private spaces in and around Canberra. Some of those still survive like the Californian redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) at Pialligo near Fairbairn Airport. Another interesting example is the cork oak (Quercus suber) plantation which Griffin urged Weston to plant. Early seed sources were from the Melbourne Botanic Gardens and the University of Melbourne. Between 1917 and 1921 different consignments (one lost through torpedo attack during World War I) were planted at the northern end of what is now the National Arboretum. They have been harvested for a number of different uses since that time, a story well told elsewhere by Susan Parsons. Beginning in the 1920s, the Commonwealth Government, through the Australian Forestry School and the Forestry and Timber Bureau, also created 23 arboreta. All of the Australian Capital Territory sites except Bendora were destroyed in the 2003 fires. After these horrific fires there was much discussion about the future use of the 250-hectare site between Black Mountain Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 25 26 Australian Garden History, 24 (4), April/May/June 2013 and Mount Strmolo, a former pine plantation destroyed in the fires of 2001 and damaged again in 2003. Eventually the Chief Minister, picking up on suggestions from the Committee established to shape Canberra after the fires, adopted the idea of developing an arboretum on this site. An international competition led in 2005 to the winning entry ‘100 Forests 100 Gardens’ by the Melbourne landscape architects Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TEC) in association with the Sydney architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer. TCE is well known for its garden design work at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne among other major projects. The design features a large Visitor Centre with interactive displays designed by the creative team Thylacine of Queanbeyan, who have done many museum displays. Following the selection of designers, experienced forestry advisers sorted through many species that might grow in this relatively dry (and drying) climate of 600+ mm annual rainfall, on these soil types (which vary from old volcanics and limestone ridges to granites), and with these differing aspects (hill slopes facing all points of the compass). The site is a spectacular lookout over the long axis of Griffin’s design, above the Lake and looking down on Government House and the Westbourne Woods Arboretum The site itself is a spectacular lookout over the long axis of Griffin’s design, above the Fake and looking down on Government House and the Westbourne Woods Arboretum. It is six minutes from the centre of Canberra and continues the green open space from Black Mountain south to Mount Stromlo. The National Arboretum Canberra continues the core concepts of such institutions with public amenity and enjoyment, education and scientific research all part of the mix of uses. The design of the arboretum allows for around 100 tree species (the number will be slightly flexible) to be planted out. They have been selected on the basis that they will probably thrive on the site (but this is to be tested of course) and other selection criteria include conservation status (endangered in the wild), their iconic status (to various nations), and for simple beauty and colour at different times of the year. Of the 104 species so far selected, 66 are Chinese evergreen magnolia (Magnolia delavayi), flowering here for the first time. Opposite (clockwise from top left): Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis), giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), Chinese tulip tree (Liriodendron chinense), monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana), weeping snow gum (Eucalyptus lacrimans), and Californian fan palm (Washingtonia filifera). Photos: Linda Muldoon rare or threatened and on the Southern Tablelands Ecosystem Park site (a forest within the arboretum) is a representation of an endangered ecosystem. The Fenner School of Environment & Society at Australian National University is conducting a major experiment on site while citizen science, led by professionals, is providing well- documented studies of tree growth, and bird and frog populations. Educational programs are being programmed into the Arboretum’s daily running along with guided walks and the site is already performing a major amenity function for horse and bike riders, joggers, and walkers. A major project of this nature, for the centenary of Canberra, seems wholly appropriate in this garden city. Further reading Max Bourke, Trees on trial: economic arboreta in Australia', Garden History, 35 (Suppl. 2), 2007, pp.2 17-26. Nina Crone (ed.). Arboretum’, special issue of Australian Garden History, 14 ( I ), July/August 2002. Paul Elliott, Charles Watkins, & Stephen Daniels, ‘“Combining science with recreation and pleasure”: cultural geographies of nineteenth-century arboretums'. Garden History, 35 (Suppl. 2), 2007, pp.6-27. Henry W. Lawrence, City Trees: a historical geography from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville,VA, 2006. Susan Parsons, ‘On the story of the cork oaks’ http://www.nationalarboretum.act.gov.au/resources/ tree_stories/corl<_oal