By Megan Backhouse
Planting Dreams: Shaping Australian Gardens by Richard Aitken, New South, $49.99
No one tells the story of Australian gardening like Richard Aitken, who takes postcards, family photographs, prize certificates, magazine advertisements and other seemingly random pieces of ephemera and weaves them together with more high-brow imagery from the State Library of NSW.
An illustration from Planting Dreams: Shaping Australian Gardens by Richard Aitken.
The pictures in all their diversity are the perfect accompaniment to Aitken's wide-ranging reflections on the twists and turns of gardening through the ages. Gardens can be scientific collections, artistic expressions, environmental statements and eccentric whims and Aitken touches on it all. By looking at everything from Indigenous environmental management to topiary kangaroos in the suburbs to the modern-day inclination to find meaning through growing food, he examines how the contemporary garden came to be. Finally, he asks where, in this age of cultural diversity and climate change, it will go next.
The House and Garden at Glenmore by Mickey Robertson, Murdoch Books, $59.99
The House and Garden at Glenmore by Mickey Robertson.
Mickey Robertson is an interior designer who "knew very little about gardening" when, in 1988, she and her husband bought an historic but dilapidated property on the outskirts of Sydney. The house "floated in a barren sea of dirt", while "disconnected" outbuildings were surrounded by weeds and bare paddocks. The book details what the couple did with "the inconsistent mess" they took on. It starts with large expanses of flat grass and ends with a series of verdant spaces teeming with cascading vines, thick hedges, perennial borders and shady trees.
There were plenty of errors along the way (choosing thirsty or otherwise fragile species, trying hellebores under peppercorns to no avail, losing plants to rabbits ...) but the general tenor is one of improvement.
Victorian readers will find more sub-tropical plants than those routinely used here, but there are lots of good ideas for dry, hot, frost-prone landscapes too.
Daniel Shipp's photographs record it all, including how Robertson has linked her home interiors with her garden.
Influential Australian Garden People by Anne Vale.
Country Gardens by Paul Bangay, Lantern, $79.99.
Paul Bangay needs no introduction. He has been been clipping, pleaching and layering for 25 years and no other Australian garden designer is so widely associated with a particular – classically inspired – style. While high-budget, leave-no-expense-spared projects are Bangay's mainstay, his designs have reached the masses through a string of gardening books accompanied by lavish photographs by Simon Griffiths.
Country Gardens by Paul Bangay.
Although the focus of his latest book is country gardens, it also includes large plots in places such as Toorak and Portsea: these gardens are bigger – sometimes by hundreds of hectares – than the typical city space. There is room for hedge-enclosed areas and expansive plantings but also wide exposure to the weather, which can mean too much wind and heat or not enough rain. Although summer is Bangay's least favourite time in the country ("parched gardens and lots of flies") his penchant for pools, mature shade trees and wisteria-clad pergolas make the season seem very benign.
Influential Australian Garden People: Their Stories by Anne Vale, Heriscapes, $49.99
Planting Dreams: Shaping Australian Gardens by Richard Aitken.
No garden is made in a vacuum and in this book Anne Vale interviews some of Australia's most influential broadcasters, educators and designers about how their approach has been shaped by others. What stands out is the diversity of responses. Fiona Brockhoff observes both the natural landscape and what the neighours are growing, while Kate Cullity mentions the seemingly polar opposites of Edna Walling and Luis Barragan. Tim Entwisle has been inspired by "knowledgeable botanists", Stephen Ryan by the "pithy" and "opinionated" writing of Christopher Lloyd, and Andrew Laidlaw still remembers hearing Martha Schwartz and James van Sweden speak at a landscape conference in 1989.
Just as there is no universal "Australian style" of garden, there is no overarching source of influence. But Vale, who took out a Victorian Community History Award for the 2013 prequel to this book, did find a consistent call for more rigorous public discussion about gardens.