Lost Gardens of Sydney
Fern frenzies, tall dark handsome shrubs and magnificent festoons - Jessica Frawley discovers the sauciness and charm of Sydney's lost gardens at a new exhibition at the Museum of Sydney
Analogised, weeded, sexualised and seeded. From the Biblical Eden to unfortunately named plants like shagbark, gardens have enlivened many an idle imagination.
Whether you're green fingered or wielding the scythe of horticultural death, gardens are exciting places. Landing in Botany Bay, settlers were met by the greatest garden of all - Sydney's bushland. New and exciting, the bush induced horticultural mania, and according to Lost Gardens of Sydney author and exhibition curator, Colleen Morris, "by the mid-19th Century gardeners... were gripped by a craze for ferns".
That's right, ferns. High on ferns and not shy of a linguistic embellishment, Victorian lah-de-dah ladies wrote startlingly Mills & Boons-esque horticultural records. With "tall, handsome shrubs", "richest crimson" and "magnificent festoons", it's enough to get any female's lady garden going.
Pruning through records, histories, art and language as flowery as its subjects, Morris' exhibition showcases 18 of Sydney's lost gardens. From humble rooftops to colonial grandeur, this exhibition digs up gardens that once housed plants from every continent - bar Antarctica, which only grows lichen anyway.
Exquisitely recapturing a paradise lost, this exhibition asks us to think how much more of our heritage we are willing to lose. Green-fingered or not, this exhibition really is a treasure.
Sydney Garden prose
On Sydney's gardens: "Fairyland" Anthony Trollope 1871-2.
On Botany Bay: "One does not wonder... of Sir Joseph Banks when he stepped ashore here...Well might he name it Botany Bay.' William Howitt, 1855.
On flowers: "I had whole boughs of them, a tall handsome shrub, bearing flowers of the richest crimson." Louisa Meredith, 1840s.
On Sydney's bushland: "The unborn Australian will ask for his birthright and be handed a piece of concrete." Kylie Tennant, 1971.
Details: Lost Gardens of Sydney is on at the Museum of Sydney.
