Planting Dreams: the natural attraction of gardens

An absorbing exhibition at the State Library of NSW offers a delightful survey of the history of gardens.

View of the female orphan school, near Parramatta (1824) by Joseph Lycett.

The idea of a garden is implicitly antithetical to that of a wilderness. A garden is inherently a place of order, peace and security, and for that reason is of necessity bounded, if not fenced off from the outside world. The Virgin Mary is regularly shown, in medieval and renaissance art, sitting in an enclosed garden, a hortus conclusus; often the barred gate of the garden is shown too, recalling her virginity.

But this image in its turn echoes a much older precedent. “God Almighty first planted a garden,” wrote Francis Bacon, chancellor of Queen Elizabeth I, pioneer of empirical scientific method and essayist, “and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.” He was in turn quoting the verse from Genesis: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

John White’s Adam and Eve frontispiece from Hans Staden’s Americae Tertia Pars (1592).

This is the beginning of the second of the two versions of the creation story that are combined in the first pages of Genesis — the one concerned not with cosmology, as the first narrative is, but with the fall of man and the origin of sin. Accordingly, while the first narrative represents the creation of man and woman together as the natural culmination of the process of making the world, the second starts with the making of man, then puts him into a sheltered garden, where woman is created, and from which they are both expelled into the harsh world outside after their temptation and disobedience.

The Garden of Eden is thus the Hebrew myth corresponding to that of the Golden Age in Greek tradition, projecting the intuition that humans could be better than we are into the hypothesis that we once were better, and seeking to explain how we came to fall from that happiness into our present state.

The Garden of Eden was translated into Greek in the Septuagint as paradeisos, borrowed from a Persian word for a walled enclosure, and its use was probably inspired by the first large-scale formal garden — and its many later imitations — built by Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae, where his palace once stood and where his tomb remains to this day thanks to its misidentification as that of Bathsheba, mother of Solomon. The outlines of a vast garden, with a network of irrigation canals, can still be seen: memories of a time when what is now an arid plain was a luxuriance of trees, water and shade.

The ordered and controlled environment of a garden, the subject of an absorbing exhibition at the State Library of NSW, is designed to offer us the most pleasurable and harmonious experience of nature. So the garden is not about the sublime, the breathtaking or the overwhelming. These are experiences encountered well outside the garden, in the setting of the wilderness; the domain of the garden, in Edmund Burke’s dichotomy, is not that of the sublime but of the beautiful. Consequently light and shade are of the greatest importance, for these are vital to our comfort and pleasure in a natural environment; and the relative proportions of sunlight and shade required vary according to the environment. In ancient bucolic poetry, written in Sicily and Italy where the summers are very hot, the pleasure of shade is constantly recalled; in England on the other hand, Keats writes with longing of “the warm south”.

The title of the State Library exhibition, Planting Dreams, evokes the way gardens compose ideal environments, specifically in the Australian context, but including a range of books and other materials that invite us to reflect on the earlier history of gardens. One such volume is a 1697 edition of Dryden’s Works of Virgil, open at the title page of Book II of the Georgics, which is devoted to growing trees.

The image represents contemporary gardeners working in a formal garden that is, as one would expect from Restoration England, a compromise between French and English sensibilities: plantings are in orderly rows and beds, governed by long vistas, as in the great gardens of Andre Le Notre at Vaux-le-Vicomte and later Versailles. The trees, however, are not sculpted into square hedges or other geometrical shapes but allowed to grow into natural crowns, anticipating their later almost complete liberation in the 18th century. The English garden of this period artfully mimics the informality of nature, while actually allowing trees to grow into a fuller expression of their own form than they can in nature, where they are usually constrained and crowded by rivals.

Another remarkable image is the frontispiece of a late-16th-century German volume on the Americas. Adam and Eve are depicted, elongated in late mannerist style, among the flora and fauna of Brazil. The plate is not meant to be polemical but alludes to the kind of problems that the expanding world of the 16th century posed for those who sought to take the scriptural texts literally.

For while the myth of Genesis implied a single creation and a single nature, voyages of exploration in Africa and Asia and, above all, the discovery of the Americas had revealed what seemed like different natures as well as different kinds of humanity. Why had God chosen to reveal himself to tiny groups of people in the Middle East rather than to humanity at large? And were we meant to believe that tapirs and llamas and armadillos were also on Noah’s ark?

In a sense the beginning of the settlement of Australia, revealing still more varied and even outlandish kinds of fauna, was the last straw for the literal reading of the Bible; by then the idea that the world was only a few thousand years old had been largely debunked and soon the discovery of evolution would bring the whole edifice down in ruins. For the past two centuries biblical fundamentalists have been eccentric, if not a lunatic fringe.

There are fascinating volumes from the heroic age of botanical research from the middle of the 18th to the middle of the 19th centuries, as well as many illustrations and watercolours of individual flowers and other plants. This was the time when the great botanical gardens of the world were formed, starting with Kew in London followed by those in Paris, Sydney and elsewhere. And especially after the foundation of Sydney, a huge process of plant transfer began, which over the past two centuries has not only brought the extraordinary flowering jacarandas to Sydney from Central and South America, but has taken Australian eucalypts all over the Mediterranean basin.

Ebenezer Howard’s design for a garden city. From the exhibition Planting Dreams: Grand Garden Design.

This process has permanently altered our sense of what is natural, so that many people assume that the jacaranda is a Sydney native, and I once had difficulty convincing a Corsican that the many eucalypts on the island had originally come from Australia. Having grown up with them, he assumed they had always been there. The original distribution of plant species — established at the very time it was breaking down — is documented in a remarkable plate, illustrating Humboldt’s statistical system in the biggest and most impressive volume in the exhibition, The Physical Atlas (1848).

Early images from Australia during the same period evoke different kinds of relation to nature, beginning with Joseph Lycett’s painting of an Aboriginal corroboree at Newcastle from around 1818, which is of great historical and ethnographic interest. It is night, and a large number of people are engaged in various dances and ceremonies, in attitudes and postures that must have made an impression on the artist — including the ritual knocking out of teeth of young men on the left. It all seems like a picture of undisturbed native life but for the discordant element of a man beating his wife in the right foreground.

WC Piguenit’s In the Grose Valley, Blue Mountains (c. 1882).

There are images of the exploration of the new land, such as the view of The Plains, Bathurst, attributed to John Lewin, which evokes the visit of governor Lachlan Macquarie to the territories opened up by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth’s crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813. Later, too, there are pictures of the pleasures of the wilderness, such as Piguenit’s In the valley of the Grose (1880), with two travellers — by then bushwalkers rather than explorers — clambering over rocks by the water and overshadowed by magnificent towering cliffs.

The exhibition naturally includes many books on the theory of gardening, as well as examples of urban planning that incorporate gardens. There are serious things like a book on garden cities from 1898 with a diagram showing how the garden city concept unites the benefits while mitigating the drawbacks of both city and country life. On the other hand, Norman Weekes’s vision of Sydney’s Future Airport (1928) imagines the buildings around Hyde Park extended into skyscrapers with hangars into which one could land one’s biplane.

Norman Weekes’s 1928 drawing, Sydney’s Future Airport.

The most bizarre piece of 19th-century kitsch is a page from an American catalogue of cast-iron fountains. Three particularly ridiculous models incorporate umbrellas. The fourth is prudishly titled “Girl and swan” although it is clearly based on the figures of Leda and the swan; but in true Victorian style, the repressed finds its way out — the water gushes from the mouth of the swan, at the top of a long phallic neck while the girl looks on in admiration.

Many of the most appealing images in the exhibition are of houses and gardens together, as they often appear in the early colonial paintings, from views of Government House to the stately Georgian mansions that used to sit among wide parks from Elizabeth Bay to Vaucluse — where, as it happens, both great houses are preserved and the latter even retains some of its gardens.

The historical exhibition is preceded, in fact, by a display of photographs of contemporary gardens in Australia, some of them very impressive. They remind us of humanity’s perennial yearning for nature as a source of refreshment and renewal, an escape from the oppression of the city, the introversion of our minds and the aridity of our egoistic preoccupations.

But these photographs, like the paintings of colonial houses and gardens, also remind us of the way that judiciously conceived built structures can enhance the experience of nature: the vertical and horizontal lines of architecture can set off the organic shapes of trees and plants; the formal geometry of a round or square pond can create stillness among the animation and proliferation of living forms.

This is not the same experience of nature that we have when we lose ourselves in the vastness and strangeness of mountains and forests. But once again these are gardens, not wilderness, and gardens represent a dialectic of culture and nature: they are not places to lose ourselves, but rather to find ourselves in harmony with the living world.

Planting Dreams: Shaping Australian Gardens

State Library of NSW, until January 15

Planting Dreams: Grand Garden Designs

State Library of NSW, until April 17