Edna Walling and Australian Gardens

There is, currently in Australia, a great revival of interest in the work of Edna Walling (1896-1973). Walling lived an unusual life for a woman of her era, rejecting the traditionally feminine and working as designer, builder, gardener and groundswoman for a whole planned village (Bickleigh Vale Village) in her lifetime. Reprints of her books are now available, and Floriligeum publisher has recently reprinted a second edition of Peter Watts' book on her work, Edna Walling and Her Gardens (2002).

Trisha Dixon (Garden Design and Style, 1991) points out that "both Gertrude Jekyll's and Vita Sackville-West's gardening practices were a romanticized concept of the traditional practical cottage garden, which was literally a means of survival for the rural poor...The influence of these great garden writers has been far-reaching. Their basic ideals have been implemented in all corners of the globe with the addition of indigenous plants lending individuality "( p. 17). She goes on to note that "the well known garden designer Edna Walling did much to popularise the romantic garden in Australia and New Zealand. Following in the tradition of Gertrude Jekyll, she skillfully wove a tapestry of romance through her garden designs and writings, and was one of the first to appreciate the subtle beauty of the Australian flora" (p. 22).

Walling's designs fall mostly into three categories: informal cottage, structured, and formal geometric. Like Jekyll, Walling loved the informality and casualness of the cottage garden, where "the picture develops by 'slip' and cutting, by root and seed, brought in a neighbour's basket and poked into some quickly stirred up patch of soil which happens to be unoccupied" (Walling, Cottage and Garden in Australia, 1947, in Watts, 2002, p. 79). The plants supplied by Walling's nursery at her own cottage (Sonning) in Bickleigh Vale Village included many traditional English cottage favourites such as foxgloves, cynoglossums, columbines, sweet williams, and forget-me-nots. Like Jekyll, however, Walling favoured the underlying structure of low stone walls (often building these with her own hands), pergolas, and small pools as a foundation for flower colour. Trees were planted in copses, and shrubs were underplanted with bulbs so that, as Watts notes, "altogether the cottages took on the appearance of many of the snug cottages in the southwest of England" (p. 80). Walling's structured gardens were used in association with slightly larger houses on larger sections of about 1/4 to 1/2 acre, and her plans for these look very much like a Jekyll plan, with their garden rooms separated by hedges or low stone walls, abundantly planted with a profusion of plants, and her use of false perspective to make these small lots seem larger than they were. The third category, of formal geometric gardens, was used by Walling for very grand houses on large allotments. In the post-Depression era of the late 1930's cheap labour availability made these possible in and around Melbourne. As Watts describes them, "these gardens are characteristically geometric in design, sometimes rigidly so. Major formal elemants such as swimming pools, pergolas, decorative pools, tennis courts, terrace walls and colonnades are beautifully tied together by axial paths that intersect at critical locations in the design...these gardens gave Walling the opportunity to indulge her love of rockwork and architectural gardens on a grand scale" (p. 83).

I had the opportunity to visit a garden near Melbourne, Australia, that retains a small portion of a Walling design. Beleura was a private estate, but it is now a business funded by the trust fund left by the last owner, and is viewable by appointment. It is a good example of Walling's 'structured' design, although much of her original design has been altered by later owners. The part that is still 'pure Walling' is a section of stone pathway, bordered by low stone walls and planted luxuriously,but fairly 'green-ly'. This area has a rather Italianate feel to it, actually.


The rest of the garden is, in the English fashion, divided into various rooms with diverse themes, from an Oriental pagoda garden planted with bamboo, including a koi pond, to a children's garden with a Hansel & Gretel motif. All the usual English estate garden features are here: a potager garden, a summerhouse with lily pools, a stone terrace with climber-covered arbour, clipped hedges, perennial borders etc. The Australian difference is in the brilliant colours and exotic shapes of the planting, including hot pink bougainvillea, kangaroo paw, and the somewhat ubiquitous (if lovely) agapanthus in sweeps in a bulb meadow. The garden is lovely, if a bit eccentric. I believe, from studying her remaining planting plans for other gardens, that Walling would have preferred something a bit simpler and with fewer diverse theme areas, but the commercial aspect of this property has no doubt affected the current choices.





















Walling was ahead of her time in promoting the use of Australian natives in public planting, however, and was quite famous for pestering public authorities about their planting choices on Australia's roadsides. In fact, in 1952 she wrote an entire book on the subject, entitled The Australian Roadside, in which she made a plea for the sole use of indigenous plants on the Australian roadsides, in order to "maintain and reinforce the regional character of a particular area" (Watts, 2002, p. 116). In an ecological approach, at a time long before that was common, Walling wrote that there is "a clear distinction between beautification or superficial decoration and fundamental organic roadside improvement" (in Watts, 2002, p. 116). As well, Walling went through a phase in her career in the 1950's when she insisted on only native plants being used in her garden designs (though later she relented and re-introduced suitable exotic species). Her interest dated back to the 1920's, when she collected and propagated many native plants at her home nursery at Sonning.

As Watts points out, "the source of the current Australian enthusiasm for native plants is complex and must certainly be linked with sentiments of nationalsim. But the work of people like Edna Walling, who promoted the concept of ecological planting and fostered an awareness among the public of the beauty of native plants, also played an important part" (2002, p. 118).

I enjoyed my exploration into this unique character in Australian horticulture. Her influence continues with a new generation of Australians, affected through her writings by her "deep love of the bush, her delight in its flowers, its complex ecology and its subtle beauty" (Watts, 2002, p. 121). I certainly heard echoes of contemporary Canadian writers such as Lorraine Johnson, who advocate the use of native plants and an ecologically sound approach to both public and private plantings.

Early colonization: Australian horticulture

Sydeny's Botanic Gardens are very park-like, open to the harbour, and enjoyed by picknickers and playing children. There are few formal garden areas. Of especial interest, however, was a pioneer garden of the plants that the early settlers tried to cultivate, many of which failed, forcing them to explore native alternatives. Also of note were the enormous daytime-flying fruit bats!



The following week, in Melbourne's Botanic Gardens, I was struck by how much of it looked like a botanic garden in England, with sweeping lake vistas worthy of Capability Brown, formal rose gardens and traditional herbaceous borders. There was, however, a hill garden all in silver, planted with mostly native drought-tolerant plants, and a native fern gully.


As Trisha Dixon notes in her 1991 book Garden Design and Style, "for many early settlers, the environment was foreign and harsh, and they quickly tried to make it look as English as possible. Early paintings show how native vegetation was completely overlooked. The native eucalypts were too subtle in their form and beauty to be appreciated" (p. 43).

Others before the settlers had been more appreciative. Joseph Banks, the famous founder of Kew, and Sydney Parkinson, one of the best known of all botanical illustrators, were fascinated by the Australian flora on their voyage with Captain Cook in the 1770's. They took every opportunity to collect, classify, and illustrate as many of the unfamiliar plants as they could, a tremendous undertaking. When a BBC crew re-created a small portion of the historic voyage in 2001, they had a glimpse of the conditions and accomplishments of the original crew. Lucy Smith, the contemporary botanical illustrator, wrote in her journal: "The volume and pressure of the work is giving me the faintest idea of how Parkinson must have felt, although at two specimens a day, I'm hardly competing with his one-time total of 94 in 14 days!" (Baker, The Ship: Retracing Captain Cook's Endeavour Voyage, 2002, p. 102).

Whether or not early settlers to Australia had ever seen Parkinson's beautiful paintings, they were obviously keen to familiarize their surroundings with very British gardens, at least at first: "Many early settlers perhaps felt threatened by the unfamiliar territory and so attempted to make an oasis of exotica totally enclosed and separate from the wider landscape...such gardens form the basis of much of Australia's garden heritage" (Dixon, 1991, p. 27-28).

Eventually, however, the changing attitudes of English gardening filtered down to the Australian colony. "The Robinsonian school of thought...soon made its way to Australia....[but] it was not until Edna Walling and William Guilfoyle started incorporating 'wild gardens' into their designs that Australians started to form an appreciation of their native flora. Guilfoyle believed the Australian wild garden should not be an imitation of those made in England and should, instead, be enriched with our own horticultural abundance. In this way, he incorporated much of the native vegetation, together with bulbs from South Africa, shrubs from New Zealand, and many other subtropical plants from around the globe" (Dixon 1991, p 43-44). This willingness to blend plants from around the world is still very much in evidence in Australia, with (for example) a formal English rose garden often being interplanted with S. African agapanthus. As with most home gardeners, the goal seems to be beauty rather than any kind of horticultural purism--and the blue and white agapanthus do provide a gorgeous complement to red and pink roses! As Dixon points out, however, "nostalgia for old world gardens is tied closely with our yearning for days long past"! (1991, p. 79).

While in Australia, I visited a private garden that is now state-owned, the George Tindale gardens on Mt. Dandenong (Victoria). This extensive garden is a perfect example of the uneasy blend of native and traditional flora, in that a large portion of it has had to be fenced off due to the danger from falling limbs from the giant eucalyptus trees that surround the garden plantings. On the day I visited, the garden was deserted, and it felt as if the Australian forest was overtaking what the garden-makers had struggled to create in their midst. The towering eucalyptus and native grasses were encroaching into the carefully enclosed, rather formal garden beds full of bright English perennials and shrubs. The only sign of some longevity of the formal plantings was the size of the gorgeous hybrid mophead and lacecap hydrangeas that bloomed throughout the woods in all shades of pink, plum, and blues from pale to intense. It was a sad place, and made me very aware that gardens seldom outlive the gardener--the 'wild' will overgrow the cultivated in short order!


On the same day, however, I visited another private-turned-public garden nearby, the Alfred Nicholas garden. This garden was situated on a steep slope with a natural lake at the bottom and, although much of the layout was that of a European country estate (complete with islands in the lake connected by Monet-like bridges), the planting was almost wholly native, and well-selected for this shady site. The vegetation consisted mostly of ferns and mosses, with only an occasional exotic shrub such as fuchsia or hydrangea for a little colour. The exotic was represented by willows, robinias, Japanese maples, and other trees surrounding the lake edge, but these were well-integrated among the native trees and shrubs. The mood in this garden was quite different, settling comfortably into its surroundings and feeling quite timeless.


On that same day, I purchased a book about Edna Walling, one of Australia's most influential garden designers in the last century. I will explore a remaining example of Walling's work in the next entry.