Flaubert’s satire reveals the difficulty of concepts of style and reception in garden history. Gardens are, after all, unusually complex works of art. On the one hand, every garden is in a sense a unique response to a particular place (hence the historical significance of the idea of the ‘spirit of the place’), while, on the other, as a mutable medium in which the natural elements can never be wholly ‘fixed’, garden design is peculiarly resistant to stylistic taxonomies. Gardens have probably always been more susceptible to changes in taste and fashion than other art forms. Roy Strong has, for example, lamented the almost complete destruction of the Renaissance garden in England during the eighteenth century, when the English landscape garden emerged as an important cultural form (and perhaps that country’s most influential artistic export). Some sense of the success of the new style can be gleaned from the poet Richard Owen Cambridge’s remark that he hoped to die before the landscape designer ‘Capability’ Brown so that he could see Paradise before Brown improved it.

These points may go some way towards explaining why, when it comes to style, landscape historians have generally restricted themselves to the vaguest possible terminology, at least compared with art historians. Seventeenth-century French gardens are, for example, still frequently described as ‘formal’, whereas, by comparison, eighteenth-century English landscape gardens are regarded as ‘informal’, but even this distinction is so general that its value is debatable.

Richard Aitken begins his new book, The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style, with an acknowledgment of these difficulties: ‘Style, as it affects gardens, is a notoriously imprecise concept.’ He goes on to note that recent efforts in international garden history to shift the emphasis of interpretation from design intentions to the reception or ‘afterlife’, as John Dixon Hunt has called it, of the garden – the uses and reactions that it elicits from its audiences. Aitken largely succeeds in keeping the two poles of style and reception at the forefront of his narrative, which comprises a highly readable and beautifully illustrated synoptic history of landscape design in Australia. The Garden of Ideas should become the standard introduction for anyone interested in the history of the garden in this country. Indeed, a book of this type has long been needed, and the Miegunyah Press should be congratulated for producing such a lavish and well-designed volume. Aitken has scoured archives and collections to bring together a fascinating selection of photographs, drawings, prints, paintings, and plans, many of which have never been previously published, and which, if anything, almost threaten to submerge his text, such is their interest and quality of reproduction.

Cranbourne Royal Botanic Gardens (photograph by Peter Hyatt)

The book provides a chronological account of the history of the Australian garden from the colonial period to the present. Aitken quite rightly emphasises the influence of English concepts of nature and the garden in the early history of Australian landscape design, but makes some interesting new observations about the transmission of foreign styles to this country. He notes, for example, that sea routes to Australia influenced Australian ideas about landscape: ‘The journey to Australia via Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope provided opportunities for picturesque appreciation and also beguiling examples of colonial outposts combining European sensibility and distinctive indigenous flora.’ Aitken thus implies an idea of the English garden as a kind of ‘travelling concept’, though he does not himself use that phrase, which reaches Australia inflected in particular ways through cultural contact and exchange.

Aitken’s book pivots around an historical shift from transplanted ideas about style to the emergence of authentically Australian styles. We hear, for example, the South Australian immigrant J.F. Bennett remarking in 1843 that, ‘I can scarcely imagine a more interesting scene than to observe a country in the course of being rescued from nature’, which implies that the importation of British styles and species might be used to correct the deficiencies of the Australian landscape. By the mid twentieth century, however, with the emergence of the bush garden movement, the aim might be said to have become exactly the opposite: the rescue of Australian nature itself.

The Garden of Ideas concludes with a brief sketch of the ‘postmodern’ garden, which Aitken argues took much inspiration from Bernard Tschumi’s follies and polycentric organisation of the Parc de la Villette in Paris. He notes that if in Modernism ‘Less is more’, in postmodernism ‘Less is a bore’, as the architect Robert Venturi put it, and that this applies to gardens as much as it does to other fields of design. He might have noted the concrete poet and garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ironic version of this axiom, ‘Mower is less’, which might, at a stretch, even be made to stand for the contemporary Australian garden, with its disappearing lawn (another foreign import, poorly adapted to local conditions).

The final section of the book deals with ‘Gardening for a sustainable future’. As Aitken writes: ‘With our suburban nation bloating inexorably, sustainability is an urgent necessity, not a luxury or whim.’ This seems absolutely right. No serious attention has been paid to the suburban garden’s impact on the environment. As Peter Timms notes in another Miegunyah book, Australia’s Quarter-Acre: The Story of the Ordinary Suburban Garden (2006), the popular Gardens and Outdoor Living magazine recently asked the question: ‘What makes a great garden?’ The answer turned out to be ten fundamental principles: ‘space, line, balance, scale, colour, texture, the handling of transitions from one area to another, repetition, unity and the creation of focal points.’ Apart from the fact that this could describe almost any designed environment or object, there is no mention of sustainability. A great garden is, rather, the exclusive product of design, emptied of social or environmental responsibility. That idea is surely, however, as passé in contemporary Australian garden design as it is in garden history scholarship, and necessarily so. As Aitken puts it in the last line of this excellent book: ‘Time is tight.’

CONTENTS: MARCH 2011