HISTORY Cover and above: Gardens can be transformed and transforming, clearly seen in the Rear coverTransforming the garden by artificial means, from the collection work of Australian-born artist and guerrilla gardener Steve Wheen in his London ‘pothole of Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna (see story on page 20). gardens’ (see story on page 13). Photo: Jess Hood Photos courtesy Steve Wheen The Ellis Stones Memorial Fund of The University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning generously assists publication of Australian Garden History. The Australian Garden History Society is a history and heritage partner of the Australian Museum of Gardening Text © individual contributors Images © as individually credited Design and typography © Australian Garden History Society GARDEN HISTORY SOCIETY Patron Sue Ebury - Countess ofWilton Executive Officer Phoebe LaGerche-Wijsman Enquiries TollFree 1800 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) Membership Individual 1 year $72 3 years $190 Household $98 $260 Corporate $230 $607 Non-profit organisations $98 $260 Advertising Rates I / 8 page $264 (2+ issues $242 each) I /4 page $440 (2+ issues $396 each) I /2 page $660 (2+ issues $550 each) Full page $ I 1 00 (2+ issues $990 each) Inserts $880 for Australia-wide mailing Pro-rata for state-wide mailing Editorial Advisory Committee CONVENOR Roslyn Burge MEMBERS Julie Collins Glenn R. 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Cooke SA Richard Heathcote TAS Michael Evans VIC Val Stewart WA Carmel O’Halloran BRANCH CONTACTS ACT/Monaro/Riverina Sue Byrne PO Box 5008 Lyneham ACT 2602 (02) 6247 3642 suebyrne@effect.net.au Northern NSW Bill Oates c/o Heritage Centre, University of New England Armidale NSW 2350 woates@une.edu.au Queensland Glenn R. Cooke Phone: 07 3846 1050 racoontoo@gmail.com South Australia Ray Choate Barr Smith Library University of Adelaide Adelaide SA 5005 Phone: 08 8303 4064 raychoate@adelaide.edu.au Southern Highlands Jennifer Carroll 27 Gladstone Road Bowral NSW 2577 carroll.jennifer747@gmail.com Sydney Stuart Read Phone: 02 9326 9468 stuart 1 962@bigpond.com Tasmania Elizabeth Kerry PO Box 89, Richmond TAS 7025 Phone: (03) 6260 42 1 6 liz.kerry@keypoint.com.au Victoria LisaTuck PO Box 479 Somers VIC 3927 0418 590 891 lisatuckl @bigpond.com Western Australia John Viska 1 48 Chelmsford Rd North Perth WA 6006 (08) 9328 1519 cviska@slope.com 2 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 The nature of things Anita Angel In 1878, an unknown correspondent, extolling the uncultivated botanical riches in the vast and varied landscapes of the Far North’s nascent colony, observed: The physical aspect of this our Northern Territory suggests to one's mind that it had been turned out of the great workshop of Nature in the rough , that the finishing touches had been omitted in order that Art might try its hand in completing the composition . ( Northern Territory Times & Gazette, 3 1 August 1 878) Steps had been taken with the establishment of Port Darwin (Palmerston) in 1 869 to establish a subsistence garden, but it is telling that from the first, our correspondent urged his readers that horticultural activity should not preclude aesthetically driven pursuits. The ‘beautiful should not be lost sight of by society’ and plans to augment the Territory’s natural resources should be complemented by obtaining ‘flowers, seeds and choice plants, to gladden the eye with their varied hues and floral loveliness’. The transformation of a nineteenth-century tropical frontier township found its earliest expression in the concept of a garden as ‘nature humanised’. This embraced a primal, place- making strategy reflected in depictions of the region by visiting and resident visual artists: its people, landscapes, flora, and fauna. The engagement by European and Australian non-Indigenous artists with Northern Australia may also be characterised through a parallel place-making device to gardens — artists’ camps. They drew their lineage from tented temporary enclosures of explorers, surveyors, and settlers, carrying maps, measuring instruments, sketchbooks, and seeds to chart, claim, and cultivate the unknown. In time, the impulse and imperative for art shifted from the empirical and topographical to the individual, social, and ecological: a desire not for claim but to be inspired, to reconnect, and to preserve. Unlike the rise of Australian Impressionism, the fragmented record left behind by these often episodic artistic encounters in the Northern Territory did not lead to the birth of a national school or style. Rather, artists’ camps and creative sojourns have endured as a contemporary practice and a Romantic tendency in the region’s art historical development, giving primacy to the detailed study of the environment en plein air and its transformation through the artistic imagination. In the Northern Territory, Aboriginal peoples have left a legacy of unbroken engagement with the land and a record of their enduring ownership of it as country Contents The nature of things ANITA ANGEL 3 Floral clocks: civic pride or horticultural kitsch? SILAS CLIFFORD-SMITH 5 The garden as adornable art VICKI MASON 9 Home thoughts from abroad: a new chapter in Australian gardening history LESLEY GARRETT 13 Journey to the centre of the turf DAMON YOUNG 17 Wearing the garden ELIZABETH ANYA-PETRIVNA 20 Victor Crittenden OAM ( 1925 - 2014 ) 24 For the bookshelf 27 Recent releases 29 Dialogue 30 Profile: Val Stewart 31 AGHS News 32 Diary dates 34 Who can fully comprehend the mystery and alchemy that take place in the leap between nature, landscape, and art? Deborah Wurrkid] (b. 1971), Native grass, 200 1 [detail], etching with chine coll Charles Darwin University Art Collection (NTU989) Reproduced with permission of the artist & Maningrida Arts and Culture Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 3 through art, pre-dating non-Indigenous settlement by millennia. Initially recorded in extensive galleries of rock art and through ceremonial and performance-related body and ground painting, its iconography and related narratives were transposed from ‘earth art’ to contemporary art through post-contact introduction of new materials and techniques. Pencils, crayons, acrylic paint, canvas, linen, and paper, along with European techniques of printmaking, enabled Aboriginal art’s release from ethnography and its reception into the realm of Australian art history. In the process, our Western definitions of landscape art and our sense of human scale, perspective, and time — as much as our political beliefs and values — were radically recalibrated or overturned. Since the 1960s, non-formalist and site-specific environmental or land art, often ephemeral and incorporating natural materials, has reflected a move away from easel-painting with sable brushes, abandoning pictorial views and vistas for a direct engagement with nature and natural forces. Art and the writing of art history were thereby transformed. A multidisciplinary approach to aesthetics became necessary, pioneered in the field of environmental history — the study of human interactions with the natural world over time. Reinstating the role of nature as an active force in human affairs, rather than as a backdrop to human history, environmental historians drove home the notion that it is impossible to relate to nature without culture: the two are inseparable. Nature was no longer ‘out there’ as an element external to our being, nor simply a subject for an artist to resolve in a new medium, but an intrinsic part of ourselves — our own nature. In a chapter of Modern Painters (1843) entitled ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, John Ruskin wrote: ‘If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the World’. He argued that only through artists’ detailed study of individual elements of nature could strength and truth be discovered sufficient to enable the last critical and creative step to be taken: the alteration of nature beyond material appearances through the artistic imagination. Today, whether tackling the big picture perspective of Australian landscape art, the immersive exigencies of contemporary environmental art or the expanded and enriched perspective afforded by Aboriginal art, Ruskin’s advice holds true: we would do well to look for those fragments of ‘small things forgotten’ that attune our senses and our feelings to the nature of things. Anita Angel is Curator; Charles Darwin University Art Collection & Art Gallery Darwin, Northern Territory. Transformations through art bring with them nuances at once highly personal and intimate: gardens of the mind inspired by the wider landscape, cultivated within the artistic imagination. John Firth-Smith (b. 1943), Dawn at the artists camp t mosquito nets /Arnhem Land 1 98 1 [detail], gouache & mixed media on Arches paper Charles Darwin University Art Collection (CDU2587). Gifted in memory of the artist's late sister Margaret Ann Firth-Smith, 20 1 3 Reproduced with permission of John Firth-Smith 4 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 Floral clocks: civic pride or horticultural kitsch ? The floral clock — once a popular garden feature — has largely escaped the attention of garden historians, but it is high time these quirky timepieces were reassessed. One of the horticultural oddities of the last century is the floral clock. Most of us have encountered them from time to time during our travels, often sighted on gentle slopes in manicured public gardens at tourist destinations. Apart from a moment’s thought at the sophistication of the technology and the intricate plantings used by the designers, most of these outdoor landscapes are soon forgotten. As a working gardener I’ve had a fascination with these quirky garden features throughout much of my working life. Not only are they a reflection of the design and propagation skills of their creators but they also express the civic pride and wealth of the community in which they are located. Floral clocks are found throughout the world but usually within temperate latitudes within societies which can afford the high cost of upkeep. Hotspots for these horologically functional novelties include North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. But floral clocks of one form or another can be found in other areas of the world too — I know of examples in India, China, and Japan, and recently stumbled on one in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, hardly a city we connect with municipal prosperity. Stereograph image of the large floral clock at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, Missouri. .Courtesy Silas ClifFord-Smith While mostly associated with twentieth-century landscape design practice, floral clocks have a history that dates back to the eighteenth century (and even earlier if their horological cousin the sundial is included). The celebrated eighteenth- century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus was, for example, obsessed with the possibilities of creating a botanical clock, known as a Horologe or Watch of Flora, made up of 46 different flowering plants which opened and closed as the day progressed, thus informing the viewer of the time of day. Linnaeus’s plan seems solely an intellectual fancy restricted to observations of the habits of individual plants, and to the best of our knowledge his clock was never constructed. Despite this, his research in Uppsala found a receptive audience over the following decades and ‘dial plants’ were sometimes grown in botanical collections. The early nineteenth-century British Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 5 Postcard view of the floral clock in the Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, showing the 1971 summer planting celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of Sir Walter Scott. Courtesy Silas Clifford-Smith Postcard view of the floral clock at Sydney's Taronga Zoo, the first built in Australia. Courtesy Silas Clifford-Smith 6 gardening authority J.C. Loudon, for instance, listed a number of dial plants suitable for the purpose in his influential Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822). During the nineteenth century, floral or carpet bedding became increasingly popular and gardeners experimented in constructing intricate designs combining brightly coloured plants sourced from around the world. Reflecting the tastes of the time, gardeners tried to make plants look like something else. While many such bedding designs were laid out in private gardens the increasing establishment of public parks saw these skills transferred into a civic setting. While carpet bedding began to loose popularity in the late nineteenth century there was clearly an interest to use the skills learnt in ‘bedding- out’ in a new modern way. Reflecting the advances in technology it is not surprising that someone would eventually build an outdoor clock Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 decorated with living plants, with the time being articulated by machine (clock hands) rather than by the plants themselves. The earliest known example of a floral clock was the I’horloge fleurie created by a French horticulturist named Debert in the Trocadero gardens in Paris (1892). Not long after, another was constructed across the Atlantic at Water W)rks Park, Detroit (1893) an d a decade later the still-extant clock at West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh (1903). Another significant early example was the giant clock created for the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, of them, and as plantings changed each year these postcard views offer a revealing record of changing design approaches. The best-known example of this chronological record is of the Edinburgh floral clock, photographed by postcard sellers most years since 1903. Designs used for this high-profile example have celebrated royal celebrations and civic achievements as well as anniversaries of significant local worthies. The first floral clock in Australia was built in Sydney’s Taronga Zoo in 1928 and since that time it has been a popular landmark destination. Women positioned on the hour marks of the floral clock at Taronga Zoo, Sydney, c. 1 930s. (National Library of Australia image from the Fairfax archive of glass plate negatives) nla.pic-vn6292220/ Fairfax Syndication Missouri. Other early floral clocks were also constructed in Le Mans, Interlaken, Budapest, and elsewhere in Europe. After the first wave of interest in floral clocks some of these were abandoned due to the upheavals of the Great War, but during the 1920s and 1 9 30s interest in the concept returned. With the increasing popularity of the motor car many towns constructed floral clocks as tourist attractions and many new floral clocks were constructed in English coastal towns. Floral clocks came on the scene at the same time as the fashion for postcard collecting so it comes as no surprise that these gardens would become a popular subject. Thanks to the popularity of postcard collecting we have a record of nearly all In 1930 a clock was built at the Royal Agricultural Showground in Melbourne. This example was constructed at the height of the Great Depression and the mechanism was made out of scrap parts, a thrifty showpiece which was a popular curio at the showground for many years. Following the construction of the large clock in Melbourne’s King’s Domain, however, the Showground dial lost its uniqueness and was later removed. As someone who has planted out formal annual beds I am in awe of the skill of the gardeners who plant-out the dials of these clocks. While some modern dials are decorated with mass plantings and coloured gravels, the true floral clock is decorated with thousands of tiny individual plants that have been raised from seed prior to planting out. Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 7 Postcard image of floral clock at Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria showgrounds, Melbourne (1930), planted out by Messrs C.E. Isaac & Sons. Courtesy Silas Clifford-Smith ^/orc/ C* lock* ROVAL AGRICUITUSAL SHOW GROUNDS- MELBOURNE Many of the locations of the early clocks were found in temperate climates with cold winters. Therefore the annual planting-out of the dial face only occurred in spring, after the end of the cold weather, as many of the plants were frost tender. Plant selection was important but with the large range of plants imported from around the world designers have had a large range of plants from which to choose. Succulents are a popular choice in many floral clock planting schemes. Hardy sedum and sempervivum are desirable as they are easy to propagate, diminutive in size, and come in a large range of colours. Less hardy choices include the larger-sized echeveria and agave. While there are many suitable non-succulent plants, popular choices include alternanthera, lobelia, alyssum, senecio, coleus, iberis, feverfew ( Tanacetum parthenium), and salvia. While most landscape themes have been well studied it is slightly surprising that garden historians have written little about these highly distinctive, much viewed landscapes. It is hard to explain such historical neglect as carpet bedding has been well documented and analysed. But perhaps these quirky landscapes have been perceived in some quarters as a form of horticultural kitsch, reflective of an earlier artistic aesthetic. But like the recent interest in garden gnomes — now sanctioned by Chelsea Flower Show — there is hope for a revival of interest in these intricate, technologically inspired, floral landscapes. Silas Clifford-Smith is a Sydney-based horticulturist, art historian, and writer with a special interest in the interwar period. He blogs as The Reflective Gardener and is the author of Percy Lindsay: artist and bohemian (20 1 I). Recent photograph of the floral clock in the King's Domain, Melbourne. Courtesy Silas Clifford-Smith MHciL ; *-V . . -Jr - 8 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 Vicki Mason The garden as adomable art Moving on from bouquets and sprays to the suburban plot, an artist finds rich pickings in her own Melbourne neighbourhood. Artists often gravitate to particular subjects and my work is generated by my passion for plants. My interest in the garden as a subject is more recent but it has been gestating for many years, perhaps attributable in part, to my great grandfather Thomas Mason, a respected horticulturist in New Zealand. His beautiful gardens in Wellington were often a topic of conversation when I spent time with my aunts, who like everyone else in the family were — and still are — keen gardeners. As a child growing up in rural New Zealand I was surrounded by plants and loved traipsing around the gardens of family and friends. I work as a contemporary jeweller, a rich field yet difficult to define. Contemporary jewellery differs from mass-produced high street jewellery. Damian Skinner’s definition from his text, The series Offshoot (2007) of botanical ly inspired brooches kick-started a budding interest in an investigation of the garden as a subject for my work. Photo: Terence Bogue Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 9 Works from the Vignettes series:The Big Tree, Standard Roses (pink and red), Welcome Mat Lawn, 20 1 3 (above); Strappy, 2013 (below). Photos: Andrew Barcham Opposite: Images of Notting Hill front gardens used as source material and inspiration for the Vignettes series of works. Photos: Vicki Mason Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective, 2013, gives a succinct definition that sums up this discipline: ‘Contemporary jewelry is a self-reflexive studio craft practice that is oriented to the body’. Imagery and motifs of botanical origin have a long history within jewellery’s imagery and so form a rich source for reinterpretation and investigation for contemporary makers. Over the many years that I’ve worked with plant imagery I’ve come to realise that gardens as a subject in themselves are also a rich vein for investigation, one that I’ve unconsciously been moving towards. When I look, for example, at an image of a series of brooches made in 2007, I had them photographed as a collection (as opposed each being shot individually, a usual practice) to reflect the idea of plants in a garden. When completing postgraduate studies recently I created a series of works photographed in similar clusters, homage to the mixed accumulation of plants used on many Australian colonial epergnes and a reflection of my own suburban garden where gifted plants sit alongside those of my own choosing. My most recent body of work, created for a solo exhibition in 2013 at Craft in Melbourne, was titled Vignettes from a suburban front yard. Inspired by plants used in ordinary front gardens within my own residential suburb of Notting Hill, a middle-ring suburb of Melbourne, I felt these modest gardens had a story to tell. This snapshot was a way of understanding this post-war suburb’s ongoing and ever changing garden history and of understanding my place within in it. My Vignettes reflect the plants and gardens of a suburb that originated in the post-war period, the estate being subdivided for settlement in the late 1950s. While some of those original gardens remain, others reflect styles popular in subsequent decades. Today many of the original quarter-acre blocks are being subdivided for infill housing or having one huge house built on them as older stock seemingly comes to its ‘use by’ date. Tiny template-style gardens, where little lawns, iceberg roses, box hedges, and small shrubs (to name just some elements) seem to be the new norm. In Australia’s Quarter Acre, author Peter Timms talks about many Australian suburban front gardens having an ‘open aspect’, a quality inherited from British garden writer J.C. Loudon. This open character lives on in the plots in my neck of the woods. From my collected primary source material in the form of sketches and photographs, I selected plants and garden planting styles that amused me (like the plant clipped into the shape of a Halloween pumpkin, or the bare pomegranate plant with fake flowers twisted round its branches observed one winter), ones I saw repeated often (for example the trend to plant standard roses in rows), and ones that I felt would make for visually interesting work be it beautiful, textural or colourful. Once I really observed carefully, I found this quotidian landscape — often seen as 10 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 — '^ sa "-"™r5S3S 1* i 3liKH1 i Evrr ti ! J F ’-^j Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 11 homogeneous and uninteresting — full of rich differences. The jewellery comprising my Vignettes was hung on the gallery wall in conjunction with architectural cut outs of housing stock of various eras which sought to locate and give context to the work. The large eucalypts in the neighbourhood interested me more than the elms, oaks, and liquidambars. I was, for instance, interested to know why huge native Australian trees existed in the suburb. A neighbour suggested drought in the area in the mid-1960s contributed to the planting of many native trees at that time. The influence of the ‘native plant movement’ and ‘bush gardens’, where the desire to live amongst naturalistic bushland was fashionable, may also have been a contributing factor. My response to these majestic trees resulted in The Big Tree pendant. I chose to situate this work next to another titled Magnolia Tree in the gallery as a way of commenting on both the changing nature of the housing stock over time (the magnolia tree fronts a massive new house and tiny garden) and also the tree selections in gardens over the suburb’s sixty- to seventy-year history. Homeowners don’t seem to be planting large trees here anymore. Perhaps they wonder if roots of large trees will affect foundations or drainage lines; and spreading canopies affecting neighbourly relations are of concern to householders here today. I was also interested in the various types of lawns that carpet the suburb. The lawn seems so ingrained in our Anglo gardening heritage. In this suburb lawn appears in perfect manicured Works from the stretches, as well as in tiny strips, like soft Vignettes series: Clipped welcome mats, fronting some of the new housing, and Neat (summer and . . r . r . ... winter), 2013 . through to take turt patches rolled out as instant Photos: Andrew Barcham garden, shining in the sun in front of solid brick homes. Clipped and Neat echoes the lawns stretching out in front of houses like swathes of fabric, stretches of cool green melding house and garden. Brown and green versions talk to the idea of the lawn in a country like Australia. I’m not sure what happens when ideas about plants and ordinary gardens become a reality in the form of an artefact for the body. It certainly encourages us to look at and think about the original places differently. By this, I mean in a less judgemental way. Instead of reflecting the tradition of picturing the suburbs as cultural voids — ingrained by critics such as Robin Boyd, Barry Humphries, and John Brack — it views these places with the same richness that Howard Arkley captured in his art. Perhaps in capturing a snapshot of these capricious landscapes and their plants, and embodying them in miniature forms, enables us to hold and wear these worlds and in doing so, possess a time and space that will ultimately pass. The gardens explored in Vignettes reflect tamed garden traditions passed down family lines or conform or adapt to cultural expectations of what a garden should look like in an Australian suburb, their vernacular character reflective of the fads, fashions, and mixed cultural make- up of the suburb. For me, garden plants and their histories capture something about our relationship with nature in this fast-paced technological age and I hope in future to look more closely at this fertile ground. Vicki Mason is a practising artist with a master’s degree (research) in gold and silver smithing from ANU. www.vickijewel.com 12 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 Home thoughts from abroad: a new chapter in Australian gardening history In this interview with guerrilla gardener Steve Wheen, we see an Australian take on a new worldwide phenomenon. Guerrilla gardening is a new worldwide phenomenon and marks a shift in the nature and intent of gardening and as such is already part of gardening history. So far, though, it has not featured strongly in Australian garden history — a puzzle as one of its internationally acclaimed practitioners is the Australian-born Steve Wheen. Born in Canberra in 1977 into a gardening family, Steve Wheen was destined to shoot to fame worldwide with his first pothole garden, laid out on wasteland in London in spring 2010. More followed, and these tiny Arcadian gardens soon became known throughout the world though coverage on social media, the internet, and his publication of The Little Book of Little Gardens (2012). Steve was promptly dubbed The Pothole Gardener attracting a strong following in countries as diverse as Germany, the USA, and India. Steve Wheen gets down to work overseeing the final stages of a new garden. Photo courtesy Steve Wheen Once seen they are not easily forgotten, possessing a universal appeal made up of happiness, hope, innocence, and surprise, and set as they are in the grimiest of locations, usually only frequented by hurrying pedestrians texting as they walk, earphones in place and with shoulders hunched. The gardens are not designed to last — they are in fact deliberately planned to be transient and it is that very transience which carries a large part of their appeal. Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 13 Bird’s-eye view (right) Deckchair and TV lamp (opposite) Photos courtesy Steve Wheen little matchbox caps and they would keep me busy for hours. That miniature world lets the imagination run wild. It was just a gradual process, a little fun at first. When I first arrived in London ten years ago the Zeitgeist here was terrible, ugly potholes damaging cars and tripping people up. It has taken me a long time to find London beautiful— it was a concrete jungle. I had never lived in a big city before and it took me a long time to find it beautiful. I had to find it beautiful in a different way. It has lead me to find a parallel beauty, a new Eden. The whole idea of the potholes is to pop people out of the present. We have secretly filmed peoples’ reactions to them. Some made a big fuss of them, some walked by, 99% realised right away what they meant. Some worried they would be stolen or destroyed by cars. They are meant to be ephemeral, they are meant to bring joy to us in the moment, to act as a catalyst to let us make our own imagination run free. Steve Wheen attended Charles Sturt University in Bathurst where he attained a Bachelors Degree in Media Studies before relocating to London to further his studies with a Masters Degree in Communications at Central Saint Martins. It was here, as part of his course work that he set about the challenge of ‘redesigning something everyone hated and turning it into something that everyone could love’. The humble pothole, hated for its ugliness and despised for tripping up pedestrian and cyclist alike, filled the bill. By marrying the raw pothole with his own personal gardening history and plant knowledge, the pothole garden was born in 2010 and catapulted onto the world stage where it became a much loved arm of guerrilla gardening. But let Steve relate his story as he related it to me when I visited him earlier this year in his London home south of the Thames. Guerrilla gardening is gardening anywhere that is not your garden. It is a protest. But that is not what I am about— it is really turning something that is crap into something else, re-designing it, turning it from something people hated into something new, a thing that people hated a few moments ago. What if, for a few moments, I could make someone now fall in love with it? I had always had a garden, my mother gardens, my grandfather bred the red- trumpeted daffodil, and my great grandfather a pink daffodil. As a child I had these two So you aim to deconstruct the ugliness you see around you and reconstruct it into something that is beautiful? Exactly. Why do you think there have been so few potholes posted on your site from Australia? The cities are still beautiful. They are lovely places. I notice that you never include people in your gardens but animals have a way of getting into the picture. I once noticed a guardsman but that was it — why is this ? Well spotted! The guardsman was a present and given to me, but the people looking at the pothole are the people in the picture, a bit like Gulliver looking down at it all. The pothole is meant to work as a catalyst on their imagination and set it free to create its own story. Where are you headed with this, what is your goal? If there is a goal it is to spread the happiness of that moment. The ultimate goal would be to start World Pothole Day and link it to charity. What is your day job? I now have my own company— a project with Google Creative Maps called The Distillery of London, with a big following online where everyone wants to come on board around the potholes, even with branding. It is about other people now— people send me their photos, a little creation, something they’ve done in their own local area. 14 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 Clothes basket (above) and Telephone box (below). Photos courtesy Steve Wheen Lesley Garrett writes occasionally for Australian Garden History and Australiana. She gardens in Sydney and the New England and has a keen interest in social issues. Steve Wheen's blog is at the potholegardenercom and his painstaking laying down of a garden can be viewed as a short film ‘Holes of Happiness’ onYouTube.com. His book The Little Book of Little Gardens is readily available and was reviewed in the May publication of AGHS NSW newsletter Branchcuttings. When you next come home, will you favour us with a pothole? Yes. Can the AGHS come on board and help? Yes. I realise our time is up and it is time to leave Steve — just for now. I head back along the London streets with a spring in my step through air that is heady with the scent of roses over pavements where every possible plant that can find the space pushes up through the cracks. And with a mind fully catalysed: perhaps there’s a pothole in me too? I can already visualise a virtual one — more a puddle really, planted with mangroves, a stingray idling in the shallows and with a yellow kayak pulled up on the shoreline and located at Mascot. Then there’s some jewellery: tiny petit point arrases of Steve’s potholes worn against the heart as love tokens. It would seem that Steve has had his way with this correspondent’s imagination as well, and I have had the great pleasure of being in the company of a man with an unswerving moral compass. ILEPI*5M Tii. — 1 ■ ■r , 4 16 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 Journey to the centre of the turf Turf has a long history, suggesting comfort, ease, and luxury. What of its awkward cousin, artificial grass? It's time to rethink the meaning of this novel surface. Modern Literature tutorial, the early ’nineties. Looking up from his yellow, handwritten lecture notes, Aziz Hakim stopped for an anecdote break. He was walking about Cambridge University, he said, with E.M. Forster. They reached a sign: Keep Of f the Grass. ‘And E.M. Forster,’ remembered Hakim, ‘walked across the grass’. This was about radicalism’s contempt for ordinary rules; about the quiet iconoclasm of the free mind. But packed into the tale is this: grass is worth censure. To walk upon grass — instead of cobblestones or paving — is a luxury, and a romantic one at that. Grass is primal. In Genesis, as soon as there is dry land, the Lord says: ‘Let the earth bring forth grass’, alongside herbs and fruit trees. Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, delivers a rare paean to the Athenian countryside, including ‘grass, thick enough on a gentle slope to rest your head most comfortably’. This is a common celebration: of the sacred grove outside the city, with spring, scented flowers, shading canopies, and lush grass underfoot. ‘Keep of the grass': Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria Sebastian Di Mauro, ‘Folly ( Themeda triandra syn. T. australiaf, timber, polystyrene, fibreglass, artificial grass, 2008 (RHS Abbott Bequest Fund 2008) Photo: Richard A'rtken In the gospels, Jesus feeds thousands of followers with bread and fish — they all ‘sit down by companies,’ reads Mark 6, ‘upon the green grass’. Grass decorated Roman villas and medieval seats: the so-called ‘turf bench’, often graced by virginal maidens. This was not a lawn, of course: vistas of cut grass were for fields, not gardens. Christopher Thacker, in The Genius of Gardening, reports that thirteenth-century estates ‘could have open grassy spaces only by laying new turf, cut from downland pasture, and beating it down firmly with mallets’. Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 17 Theologian Albertus Magnus, a student of Thomas Aquinas, wrote of the ‘green cloth’ of hammered grass, including seats so that ‘men may sit down there to take their repose pleasurably when their senses need refreshment’. This tedious job continued for some five centuries. Then technology and mobility intervened: by the end of the nineteenth century, after the invention of the mechanical mower, lawn had become common — but not vulgar. Grass retained its suggestion of idyllic comfort. It could be wild but benign, fecund but not smothering — part of a vision of what Bloomsbury author and publisher Leonard Woolf, with some irony, called ‘snakeless meadows ... wildflowers, and the song of larks’. There is labour, of course. But this is all part of the charm: turf is necessity constrained by artful freedom. This is the luxury of the Touchett estate in Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, with its ‘delightful’ afternoon tea: ‘the flood of summer light had began to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf’. Smooth and dense: this rhizome is thick Not couch grass, but grass couch: the medieval turf seat. Barth lemy d'Eyck, ‘Arcita and Palemone admire Emilia in her Garden', c. 1460, from an illuminated manuscript of Boccaccio’s Teseida (1339-40). sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (Cod. 2617 Han, 53r) Synthetic symmetries: artificial turf in the suburbs. Photo: Vicki Mason with fertility, yet firmly lopped and cropped by the staff. For over two thousand years, grass has accompanied civilisation as an intimation of divine blessing or proudly tamed wilderness. Unless it is not real grass, but what my children call ‘fake grass’. Artificial turf is novel, clever, cheap, and certainly low maintenance. But it is not grass; neither a piece of primal grace, nor proof of seemingly virtuous manual labour. It is made in a factory — usually overseas — from plastic and rubber, often including tiny pellets of recycled car tyres. (Which, according to a study by Environment and Human Health, Inc., ‘increases the potential of zinc toxicity’” in gardens, and might be carcinogenic.) Originally called ‘Chemgrass’, artificial turf’s grand entrance was in the Houston Astrodome, 1966. Designed as a less expensive playing surface for gridiron, AstroTurf is now used widely for ball sports and athletics. Some criticise its microbial count and heat (now apparently countered with TurfAide™ and AstroFlect™), as well as its lack of bounce and abrasiveness. Nonetheless, artificial turf continues to be cheaper than regularly mown, fertilised, and watered grass, as well as less vulnerable to capricious weather. Which is, of course, the charm of fake grass in gardens. There are no athletes sprinting and tackling; no fears of final quarter dehydration or plastic bum. Aside from the health risks, artificial lawn seems perfect: James’ ‘smooth and dense’ turf, without the Victa and daily sprinklers. And yet, stigma remains. Part of this is tactile: artificial turf is simply not as soft and cool as the water-hungry rhizome. But it is also philosophical: it concerns, not with how the lawn feels, but with what it means. 18 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 One of the hallmarks of this age of mass production is the aura of the ‘original’. If we are thronged by copies of copies, the archetype gains a kind of magical charm: authentic and primordial. In this outlook, ‘fake grass’ is a counterfeit: a pretence, which lacks specialness. Obviously it is as real as any other thing. But it is not really grass: it is a false, downgraded, gimcrack stand-in. Alongside this fear of copies is suspicion of the mass produced: if grass is organic, fertile, manual, local, then artificial turf is mechanical, sterile, automated, globally shipped. Put simply, if grass is natural, then AstroTurf and its generic copies are unnatural, with all the moral baggage this hauls about. The problem with this outlook is that ‘fake grass’ need not be grass at all. Yes, it was engineered to look like young, freshly mown turf. And in this, it is a so-called skeuomorph: a new design than keeps decorative parts of the old. Think of fountain pens resembling quills, computer programs with knobs and dials, cars with faux- wood panelling — each makes new technology seem friendly in its familiarity. But artificial turf is not just fake grass — it is also real rubber and plastic. It is a unique surface, with very particular qualities. It is usually bright green and fuzzy, but it might equally be slate blue, persimmon orange, or creamy white. It can decorate chairs, walls, or bollards as easily as courtyards. It is, in other words, simply another part of a modern design toolkit. True, we do not water and mow it ourselves — it is another example of the modern escape from manual labour. But no more so than having gardeners visit weekly, or the many other gardening products — slate tiles, treated pine fence posts, stainless steel chains, - \ fy * ■ - U *-■ 1 wp? Victorian lamps — we regularly buy from others. (And which are also mass produced.) The point is not that the synthetic lawn is a wonderful decoration in every garden; that we can do away with plants altogether. (As I note in Philosophy in the Garden, the garden is valuable partly because of its vivid fusion of humanity and nature.) And clearly there are aesthetic issues alongside those of health and comfort. Medieval dreams: artificial turf at Federation Square, Melbourne. Photo: Damon Young The point is that artificial turf can be a bona fide decorative choice. And it can be chosen, not simply because it is cheap or easy to maintain: a second-rate version of The Real Thing. It can add novel texture, colour, and shape to an overall design. It is not a romantic luxury, true — not worthy of EM Forster’s iconoclasm. But sometimes the radicalism is in the garden itself, not in the decision to stroll over it. Dr Damon Young is a philosopher; and the author of several popular nonfiction books, including Philosophy in the Garden, recently published in Australia and overseas. www.damonyoung.com.au Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 19 eleuaiste ■lUTItlflEL. •m gK. i M fv 1 - 1 V js Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna Wearing the garden Assemblage of nineteenth-century artificial flowers, instruction manuals, flower-making equipment, and documentation: essential accoutrements to an informed understanding of contemporary dress fashion. Photo: Richard Aitken A fashionable party from Godey's Lady’s Book (Philadelphia, 1 859) showing floral decoration combining with garden elements such as trelliswork. Courtesy Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna Floral motifs in dress fashion have a long history; less well known is the way these were used collectively in the nineteenth century to represent contemporary garden fashions. In the years either side of i860 British newspapers circulated a mischievous pun — ‘An artificial florist lately described himself as “head gardener” to the ladies’ — originally published in Punch’s Almanack. The quip was evidently popular, for it was republished over twenty times in different regional centres across England and Scotland. Similar jokes, found in the same newspapers, tally less than half this number of reprints. It was a good joke evidently, good enough for a revival twenty years later when it was republished in Australian papers. What was it about this one- liner that so amused mid-century minds? This image of the garden corresponding with dress fashion and artificial flowers was a common enough refrain, exhumed whenever the flower was again ascendant in fashion. Flowers were worn on little toques and bonnets to the opera and theatre, in the hair by draping and curling amongst chignons and frizz, carried in posy holders, and swathed across the body in swags throughout the nineteenth century. Commentators, and in particular the press, found the metaphor of the decorated female body as a garden irresistible. Uncomplicated, it appears to have easily elicited a response or provoked a trite metaphor. The sight of a ball hosted at the Melbourne Town Hall ‘was like a parterre of flowers waving in the wind’. This 1885 description referred to the posies and garlands worn by dancing women but also to the regimental 20 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 uniforms and the formal geometry of the dancers. The entire ensemble and scene was a garden made of bodies, colours, and vegetation. This evocation of the parterre found a continental echo in la Belle Epoque, recounted in the 1930s by couturier Paul Poiret in his autobiography. ‘The women kept on their hats’, he recalled of the theatre-going Parisians, ‘they wore little bonnets with or without strings and plaited with velvet flowers, Parma violets or geraniums’. ‘Then, the parterre really was a flower garden’ he added, cleverly conflating the French term for a theatre audience with a garden style. Fashion plates of the mid to late 1880s depict trails of vines and greenery dotted with blooms winding through the swags and drapery of tournures (bustles) down toward the train or dotted around the skirts, sometimes trailing from the corsage like a climbing plant. Skirts were crosshatched to resemble a trellis, with vines and growing flowers, like the convolvulus, encircling skirts. The corsage had become a metonym for the bouquet pined to the shoulder, when it was once commonly known to embrace the entire bodice. The flower had long been a popular design motif, with a rich and evocative history, equally revered in Australia as other parts of the world. Victoria’s colonial history of boom-and-bust demonstrated this correlation with flower fashions and how they were manifest locally — often in the form of artificial flowers, a French specialty. The first flower maker in the colony was an un-named Few anthropomorphised the garden and its denizens as skilfully as French caricaturist J.J. Grandville — here shears and secateurs run amok amongst the hawthorn (Aub pine) in his Les Fleurs Anim es (Paris, 1 847). Courtesy Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/ September 2014 21 Artificial flower bouquet from the self-published book by 'Artiste to Her Majesty' Emma Peachey, The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling (London, 1851). Courtesy Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna Garden, interior; and body merge: Floral table arrangements from T.C. March, Flower and Fruit Decoration (London, 1 862) Private collection Carpet bedding from Robert Thompson, The Gardener’s Assistant (London, 1 890) Private collection Presenting a posy, from an undated nineteenth-century chromolithograph Courtesy Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna craftswoman who crossed Bass Strait in the early 1 840s to open a workshop in Melbourne Town, but her enterprise failed because of a lack of custom and she returned to Van Diemens Land in 1848. Contemporaneously, diarist and artist, Georgiana McCrae received a box of supplies from her family in Scotland. The parcel included artificial flowers that she was able to sell for quick money during a time of economic depression and personal hardship. Importation was the main means of distribution of artificial flowers in the colony, but small craft workshops began to operate in Melbourne from the 1 860s onwards. Most of these workshops were located in the arcades of the city and produced decorative flowers for the drawing room as well as for the bonnet. The Sargood family (later of Rippon Lea fame), when starting their trade enterprise, advertised stridently in the early 1850s that a new shipment of artificial flowers had arrived, the font size bold and larger than surrounding announcements for other drapery goods. Artificial flowers were evidently in great colonial demand and as a successful business the firm continued to import French, English, and German flowers, eventually in the 1900s devoting an entire floor of its Flinders Lane emporium to flowers and millinery trim. A similarity is evident between flowers worn as dress adornment with fashions in garden design. From the 1830s to the late 1860s, for instance, wax coronets for the hair were styled geometrically and fresh flowers were contrived into concentric circles. These patterns aligned with contemporary garden and flower arranging fashions, with overtones of the gardenesque and derived from formal floral bedding. The popular geometric revival of the 1 840s, with an interest in terraces around the house studded with flower beds in cut turf, went hand-in-hand with the gardenesque, a term coined by J.C. Loudon in 1832, to elevate gardening alongside the sister arts such as architecture, painting, and sculpture. By the time of Edward Kemp’s Ho H BJ-M P'raps Iwar*-- SHh -rf nun r* at r-d tonui 0* WBfmmwMwp uur p i nrruiuiuwMUrn.iywBuif Social media links: We now have our social media links in the top right hand corner of the homepage (they look like Christmas baubles) to link you directly to our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram accounts. We encourage you to ‘like’ and ‘follow us’ on these sites. There are still a few issues we are in the midst of having rectified so we are very grateful for your understanding as we move ahead with our new online presence. Phoebe LaGerche-Wijsman Executive Officer www.gardenhistorysociety.org.au Review of Studies in Australian Garden History The National Management Committee has embarked on a review of the Society’s peer-refereed journal Studies in Australian Garden History. This will involve wide consultation with past editors and contributors, as well as a wide circle of potential contributors drawn from a wide circle of professional, academic, and other scholarly communities. A draft report is to be considered by the NMC at its meeting prior to the Albany conference. 2014 Annual National Conference There are still a few places to attend this year’s Annual National Conference, ‘The Great Southern’, in Albany, Western Australia. Please call the National Office for more information. Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 33 Diary dates JULY 2014 Sunday 13 AGM and The last of the romantics WESTERN AUSTRALIA WA Branch AGM followed by guest speaker by Anne Vale on The last of the romantics: lady garden makers’. Anne’s book Exceptional Australian Garden Makers will be available for sale. 2pm, Grove Community Centre, Peppermint Grove. Wednesday 16 Flora on the move ACT/RIVERI N A/MON ARO Max Bourke AM will discuss acclimatisation ideas from the nineteenth century and beyond, and their implications. 6pm, Australian Catholic University, Watson. Thursday 17 Winter lecture series VICTORIA ‘Garden writers and Philosophers of the 1980s, lecture presented by Anne Vale. 6-8pm, Mueller Hall, National Herbarium, Birdwood Avenue, South Yarra. $20 members $25 non-members, $10 students (with student card). Book through Trybooking http://www.trybooking.com/EFWD. Enquiries to Lisa Tuck on 0418 590 891 or LisaTuckl@bigpond.com Saturday 19 Working bee Working bee at Mount Boninyong. Contact Fran Faul on 9853 1369 or email malfaul@alphalink.com.au TASMANIA Sunday 20 Poisonous plants in Queensland gardens QUEENSLAND Lecture by Dr Ross McKenzie, a retired veterinary pathologist, toxicologist, and research scientist from the Queensland Department of Primary Industries. 2pm, Queensland Herbarium.A visit to Dr McKenzie’s garden Yapunyah, 26 Cypress Drive, Ashgrove, will follow. Sunday 27 Stirling and Hills region archival collections SOUTH AUSTRALIA Presentation by Committee members of the Mount Lofty Districts Historical Society on archival collections of the Society relating to gardens in the Stirling and Hills region. 2-4pm, Stirling Library, Mount Barker Road, Stirling. Cost: $5 per person. Details in Branch newsletter. Sunday 27 \_n the steps of Joseph Hooker: botanical trailblazer TASMANIA Lecture presented by Peter Donaldson, Australian film-maker undertaking a major documentary project retracing the travels of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker through the Himalayas, the Antarctic, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. Refer to the Branch webpage for more details closer to the event. Sunday 27 Old Science Road, University of Sydney SYDNEY Walk and talk down Old Science Road, University of Sydney, Camperdown Campus led by Christine Hay. 2-4pm, meeting place to be confirmed when booking. Cost: $20 members, $30 guests, includes light refreshments. Bookings essential. See Branch webpage for details. AUGUST 2014 Sunday 10 Winter seminar and AGM SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS Two guest speakers, author Stephen Ryan (former ABC Gardening Australia presenter) on ‘Developing a country garden: the Mt Macedon experience’, and horticulturist Paul Kirkpatrick on The weird and wonderful world of plant collectors: Kew stories’. See Branch webpage for further details. Saturday 16 Working bee VICTORIA Working bee at Mooleric. Contact Fran Faul 9853 I 369 or email malfaul@alphalink.com.au AGM and 30th birthday party Sunday 17 SOUTH AUSTRALIA Luncheon at Carrick Hill. Foundation members of the Branch will be invited to attend. l2-3pm. Details in Branch newsletter 34 Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/ August/September 2014 Sunday 17 [ South American gardens and AGM QUEENSLAND Kim Woods Rabbidge will provide an illustrated lecture of her successful tour of South America, referring to two well-known gardener designers; Roberto Marx Burle from Brazil and Juan Grimm from Chile. See Branch webpage for further details. Tuesday 19 Winter lecture series and AGM VICTORIA ‘Insights into theTravels and Botany of Joseph Hooker’ by Dr Peter Donaldson. 6-8pm,AGM followed by illustrated lecture, Mueller Hall, National Herbarium, Birdwood Avenue, South Yarra. $20 AGHS members, $25 non-members, $ 10 students (with student card). Bookings essential. Book through Trybooking http://www.trybooking.com/EFWE. Enquiries to Lisa Tuck on 0418 590 89 I or LisaTuckl @ bigpond.com Wednesday 20 Jardins Anglo-Chinois in eighteenth-century France SYDNEY Talk by Jennifer Milam. 6 for 7-8. 30pm, Annie Wyatt Room, National Trust Centre, Observatory Hill. Cost: $20 members, $30 guests, includes light refreshments. Bookings essential. See Branch webpage for details. Sunday 24 Today's gardens — tomorrow's heritage TASMANIA Lecture by well-known landscape architect Jerry de Gryse. See Branch webpage for further details. Late August-early September Smith's Nursery, Riddell's Creek VICTORIA Self drive visit to Smith’s Nursery, Riddell’s Creek with John Hawken Heritage Victoria. BYO picnic lunch. Date and details to be confirmed on the Victorian Branch website. SEPTEMBER 2014 Wednesday 3 Banongil Station VICTORIA Day tour to Banongil Station where the daffodils should be in full bloom. Members only. Cost: $80, but may vary according to numbers, includes transport, morning tea and lunch. TryBooking details to follow. Enquiries to Lisa Tuck on 04 1 8 590 89 1 or LisaTuckl @bigpond.com Friday 5 Heritage gardens day: Joadja SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS This event will include a tour by owners, morning tea, and lunch. Enquiries (for this event only) to Laurel Cheetham on (02) 486 1 7132. Saturday 13-Sunday 14 Double working bee VICTORIA Working bees will be at Eurambeen and Belmont. Contact Fran Faul on (030 9853 1369 or email malfaul@alphalink.com.au Wednesday 17 Ipswich QUEENSLAND Trip to Ipswich including house tour ofWoodlands and lunch there, followed by visit to Queens Park with afternoon tea. Organised by Wendy Lees. See Qld Branch webpage for details. Saturday 20 Everglades and The Braes, Leura SYDNEY Guided walk at Everglades followed by light lunch and a visit to nearby garden The Braes in Leura. I I am-3.30pm, meeting place to be confirmed when booking. Cost: $35 members, $40 guests, includes light lunch. Bookings essential. See Branch webpage for details. Date to be advised Tasmania TASMANIA Edna Walling and Kitty Henry gardens in Hobart. Date and details to be confirmed on the Tasmanian Branch webpage. OCTOBER 2014 Friday 17-Monday 20 AGHS Annual Nation Conference, Albany, Western Australia The Australian Garden History Society’s 35th Annual National Conference will be held in Albany, WA, 17-20 October 2014. Australian Garden History, 26 (1), July/August/September 2014 35 T' UF WnlaMi l;\bwt J 1 ' Vrj[|jiSr Lit- EMC TUI 1 ’, ill MJ* HOG’S MAKTO fc PAPER Ur Mhh. J. II. MINTOTIX aro