I. INFORMACIÓN GENERAL
6. ADMINISTRACIÓN DEL RIESGO
In the 19th century, the designed landscapes of Australian cities were overseen by
landscape architects and surveyors, engineers, curators, park superintendents, and landscape gardeners. Moreover, the creation of Melbourne’s public parks and gardens can also be credited to horticulturalists (Saniga 2012). The distinction between a public garden and park is not always clear. In general, a garden is an area in which horticulture is strongly practised. William Robert Guilfoyle (1840-1912) was a self-trained landscape designer who reshaped Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens from a collection of plants into a public landscape reflecting social values and paying homage to Australia’s native flora. Guilfoyle, in Australian Plants Suitable for
Gardens, Parks, Timber Reserves, etc, suggests using a wider range of Australian
native plants in parks, streets, and home gardens, and many of the trees illustrated in this book still exist in the Royal Botanic Gardens today (Guilfoyle 1910; Saniga 2012, p. 27).
Australia’s earliest public garden in Sydney was located on land adjoining the first Government House, and was Australia’s first official botanic garden. At the site, there was already a fine natural garden of angophoras, banksias, eugenias, and eucalypts. In 1965 the Garden History Society was established to increase public awareness of the value of historic gardens and the need to protect them. The International Council on Monuments and Sites in 1971 declared that a historic garden is: ‘an architectural
48
and horticultural composition of interest to the public from the historical and artistic point of view’ (Watts & Barrett 1983, p. 13).
Evidence of the influences on Australia’s first gardens can be found in Thomas Shepherd’s4 lectures on landscape gardening in Australia, which were published in
1836 (Watts et al. 1983). The lectures increased the concept of broad parklands around country estates and the idea that indigenous Australian trees already present could be a part of park scenery. The desire of 18th century English landscapers to
recreate a rural landscape had been altered early in the 19th century by new theories
of the sublime and the picturesque. This is also observable in landscape paintings explained in the previous section. The sublime, one of the major themes within Romanticism, comprised grandeur of thought and emotion, and it migrated to the colonies with, among others, von Mueller, a director of Melbourne Botanic Garden. In a Romantic sense, von Mueller felt he faced his own human frailty in a rugged, trackless country with challenging natural elements. Gold rush travellers were similarly shown to have Romantic views of the Australian landscape (Verrocchio 2001). In contrast to the sublime, picturesque refers to an artistically composed representation of the natural world. The term ‘gardenesque’ describes a picturesque design furnished with exotic plants. Subsequently, terraces, flower beds, and fountains were introduced and rural estates started using a more decorative approach to garden design. The change in garden fashion was fast and widespread in Australia, and when time and money became available, the gardenesque became a strong influence, particularly in Victoria. Westbrook (1995) describes the transformation of the urban garden in the 19th century in Australia:
The 19th century witnessed a conceptual as well as social transformation of
the urban garden. The picturesque park of the aristocratic 17th and 18th
century dilettantes, where individual display was submerged beneath a concern to represent often highly complex philosophical and political ideas
4 Thomas Shepherd (1779 - 1835), proprietor of the Darling Nursery, Sydney, was a practical gardener
who lectured on horticulture and landscape gardening and encouraged the cultivation of New South Wales plants.
49
within the framework of an Arcadian classicism … was replaced by a new type of park which emphasised within an increasingly secular, scientific world view (Westbrook 1995, pp. 7,8).
There were few public gardens in Victoria before 1850, which were made for the purpose of leisure and decoration. In the 1860s, there was little consistency in garden design, although they contained some decoration, their paths were usually curved, and the trees were small. Murndal Road Tahara, Southern Grampians Shire, is at the heart of a pastoral run formerly known as Spring Valley, with historically significant characteristic patterns of early land settlement and large-scale pastoral enterprise in Victoria. Murndal Road with its ‘Richmond Park’, ‘Cowthorp Oak’ and ‘Coronation Avenue’ attempted to recreate an English landscape setting in the Australian countryside. In contrast, city gardens such as Rippon Lea, one of Australia's finest grand suburban estates and the first to achieve National Heritage listing, had extensive orchards and kitchen gardens (Watts & Barrett 1983).
Some of the similarities in approach of Victorian landscape architects and designers of the 20th century, such as Stones and Guilfoyle, were that they liked designing broad
landscapes that controlled external space, while elements such as buildings were used as identifying devices. Stones and Guilfoyle both employed the elements of composition, scale, form, control of space, exploitation of light and shade, and sympathetic relationships of materials in their work (Yencken & Gunn 1976). There are also some major differences reflected in the gardens created during this time. For instance, Guilfoyle’s designs chiefly incorporated exotic plants and high maintenance lawns to reproduce traditional European experiences. On the other hand, Ellis Stones used indigenous and native plants in his gardens, claiming that they were well adapted to the soils and climate and thus survived better. Regardless of deliberate use of native plants, landscape design often takes place where either there is an existing native character or in sites that adjoin other sites that still retain their native vegetation (Yencken & Gunn 1976).
50