Origins of horticulture

The beginnings of plant cultivation and domestication

The series of articles on historical gardens focuses on garden structures and practices that have become part of cumulative horticultural tradition. For a broad contextual account of horticulture and its relationship to agriculture see the Wikipedia article on the history of gardening.

Introduction – The Origins of Horticulture

The scientific process of observation and experiment applied to plants must go back to the dawn of our species and the long process of determining which plants could be used as tools and structural materials. Also, the effect of different plants on our bodies – which plants were safe to eat or use in drinks, which had medicinal properties, and which affected our minds in some way. And somebody needed to know where these plants could be found and processed. This plant knowledge was precious, it could be a matter of life and death, and it would have been a part of an oral traditional of tribal knowledge handed from generation to generation, perhaps by experienced tribal elders or maybe a shaman-like medicine man. All this would have happened long before plants were first cultivated.

Plant husbandry

Plants of special value – for whatever reason – maybe sacred trees, bushes with edible fruit and so on would have received special attention. But there must have been a time, many millennia ago, when tending plants became more than the simple husbandry of plants growing naturally in the wild – although we can only speculate about the humble character and reasons for the first Palaeolithic spaces dedicated to plants and their cultivation. Certainly there was the need for food, but beyond that lay more indefinite cultural factors.

The sacred grove within nature

We can imagine the rudimentary and humble Palaeolithic beginnings of the idea of a garden as a special space among plants – probably the sacred grove, a clearing among trees, or maybe an open space dedicated to ceremony and ritual, perhaps feasting, maybe fun and relaxation but also the solemnity of religious observance with possibly a simple shrine, crude seating or an altar. Such places abound in mythology around the world, both east and west, and when the Romans arrived in Britain they reported such spaces used by the Druids, often at places of special significance within the landscape: hilltops, places where water was plentiful, or at the crossing of pathways. These would have been the makeshift meeting places of hunter-gatherers, cultivation of necessity not arriving before communities adopted settled lifestyles.

Though such places hardly meet the definition of a garden we see here the suggestion of a spiritual space, probably without an enclosing boundary, that was a forerunner of the enclosed temple and palace sacred groves of the Bronze Age civilizations in the Fertile Crescent.

Themes already evident by this time include sacred and secular space, garden as oasis or paradise, landscape and geometry, plant collections for ornament and medicine, sometimes from distant lands, plants for their utility in the physical external world and for their symbolism and religious and aesthetic value in the world of ideas. Already from these humble beginnings is emerging a dialectic of ideas and categories that will echo down the ages. With the first bounded garden or precinct came the notions of inside and outside, nature or culture, perhaps over time including additional categories of wild or cultivated, natural or artificial, art or science.

Body and spirit

A simple distinction can be made between plants that served physical needs and those that related in some special way to spiritual or mental life. Some plants nourished the body: others nourished the soul.

But first there was the need for food. In all likelihood discarded pips and other plant remnants left over from feasting around camp fires sprouted into food plants that could be harvested when sites were revisited. Plants could be grown easily enough in special areas dedicated to their cultivation, as either transplants or cuttings. Grown from seed the process of continuous selection from plants with desirable characteristics would eventually give rise to new kinds of plants with combinations of characters not found in their wild ancestors.

The large-scale domestication of animals and plants that we call agriculture did not arise from a single region and tradition. Archaeological evidence suggests that agriculture arose independently in at least 11 major centres across the world over a period spanning about 6000 years and referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. The earliest of these centres occurred in the Ancient Near East dating back about 12,000 years, probably a product of the conducive climate and growing conditions in this region after the last Ice Age and the presence of both animals and plants amenable to domestication, although the precise reasons are disputed (Rindos 1986; Smith 1986; Diamond 1997; Tudge 2003). In Europe the Agricultural Revolution gradually spread from the Ancient Near East, taking about 8000 years to reach the British Isles in the north-west (Cunliffe 2013).

Most of the larger agriculture-based population centres in Europe were situated in river valleys with a ready source of water and fertile sedimentary soils. However, world-wide it appears that there were many different kinds of proto-farming on the way to the fields and pastures that we are familiar with today, all this still being a matter of keen academic debate (Holmes 2015). In New Guinea, for example, a form of shifting agriculture was practiced while in Australia food plants were managed in many different ways (Clarke 2007): there was not only the careful burning of natural vegetation to drive out animals and induce the formation of succulent new shoots using the method now known as ‘firestick farming’ (Jones 1969, Gammage 2011) but wild cereals were also harvested in situ (Gerritsen 2008) and wild yams and other plants were propagated and managed in a horticulture-like manner (Gott 2002).
Agriculture provides the big-picture backdrop to the history of botanic gardens not only because it now underpins all human existence as a source of sustenance but because it produced the surplus wealth that facilitated the urbanization and civilization from which botanic gardens would emerge.

Less certain is the way plants nourished the ‘soul’. What were the attitudes and beliefs of our ancestors and how did these influence their plant management?

So far as we know, societies in prehistory attributed nature with human characteristics, it was anthropomorphised, and the spiritual world was one of temporal continuity, extending through past, present, and future through ancestors, the living, and the afterlife. Underlying the human relationship to plants would have been innate and universal factors: our fascination with their beauty, novelty, utility, and the way they teased our intellectual curiosity. But the plant world of our ancestors would have been far richer in symbolism, mystery, and religious meaning than that of today.
Hunter-gatherers lived in small nomadic bands within nature. They were a part of nature itself, much as non-human primates are a part of nature today; they depended on unpredictable weather and other uncertain environmental factors to secure their seasonal sources of food. Their fate, they believed, depended on spiritual forces from an unseen world and it was probably this spiritual realm that dictated plant practices. Perhaps special attention was given to those plants growing in areas set aside for ceremony and ritual, especially areas associated with ancestors and the dead – maybe around a burial mound, sacred tree, sacred grove, or a shrine of some kind. Simple shrines dedicated to local deities are found the world over. When Roman garrisons landed in Britain and the written history of these islands began, Druid shrines were recorded at sites of special significance within the landscape: at the crossing of major pathways, on hilltops, headlands, beside sources of fresh water, or associated with some other natural feature. Romans would have been familiar with shrines like these from their own country, knowing that they dated back into prehistory (Hooke 2010; Nielsen 2013; Turner 2013).

We must look to early human settlements to tell us more about the developmental path that led to today’s cultivated spaces and the particular plant interests that would later become the special concerns of botanic gardens.

Agriculture and early civilization

Living together in ever-increasing numbers required the careful management of both people and physical space as more and more land was appropriated from nature for human use.
The Agricultural Revolution changed for all time the relationship between humans and nature in at least three critical ways that have dramatically changed the relationship between humans and plants: it changed the human evolutionary environment; it created a world consisting of new physical spaces (including gardens, parks, and fields) with a corresponding new world of associated words and ideas that emphasised a distinction between nature and culture; and it produced the conditions needed for the emergence of new forms of social organisation and development.

Human evolution

The natural forces of evolutionary selection that had forged human bodies and minds were being replaced by human-derived selective forces: humans had moved out of their environment of evolutionary origin into an environment of their own making. From this time on, changes in human social circumstances would, for the most part, be a consequence of rapid cultural change, rather than slow biological change.
Paradoxically, though humans were the domesticators it is as though they were themselves being domesticated. And insofar as agricultural crops were determining lifestyles then humans were being domesticated by plants. The coevolution of humans and plants had entered a new phase.

Urbanization – physical and mental space

City dwellers now lived behind walls that both separated and protected them from what lay beyond. The distinction between nature and culture (as civic space) had been literally set in stone. Though nature was accessible outside city walls, plant cultivation in urban surroundings would become more and more the way of engaging with nature and the natural seasonal biological rhythm of growth, maturation, death, decay and renewal.
Even in the earliest phases of urbanization we can recognise at least six kinds of special human spaces – all potentially containing cultivated plants and all with counterparts today. These are structural or bounded spaces that suggest values as well as functions:

• space for domesticated plants and animals as grazing land and cereal crops, also orchards, vegetable plots, and vineyards
• space for domestic housing
• communal space: a city square or forum for discussion generally including a place for trade, places for recreation, relaxation, and entertainment
• an administrative centre, usually the ruler’s palace and its grounds
• religious space for temples and various monuments associated with the dead
• connecting space for the passage of people and goods

What is not so obvious is that urbanization created not only functional physical enclosures but an associated conceptual world of words and ideas comprising categories and distinctions relating to these spaces and to the distinction between human space and natural space – categories that were absent from the Palaeolithic mind. The new mental categories, though hardly exclusive boundaries of separation were certainly assertions of difference expressed as a dialectic between objects of nature and objects of culture. Those relating directly to plants included: natural/man-made, wild/cultivated, urban (town)/rural (country). Other distinctions that related to cultivated plants were public/private, formal/informal, sacred/secular, work/pleasure, utility/luxury. As cities grew, so too did the corresponding agricultural space needed to feed them and this produced a trichotomy urban/rural/wild in which enclosure, a feature of urban space, would become of increasing significance in rural space.

All these contraries, and more, are generally subsumed under the all-embracing contrarian theme of nature/culture that arose largely as a consequence of agriculture.

Social organisation

Social order among large numbers of people was maintained with effective government based on strong social hierarchies. The community was usually headed by a single, often religiously-sanctioned, god-like ruler. Matters of state were then overseen by the ruler and court from a royal palace. Spiritual matters were the concern of a priest class operating from a temple. Palace and temple precincts were used to gain the support of the gods, to inspire citizen pride, and to instil visitors with both admiration and fear. The management of space would become critical as legal systems defined public and private places, systems of ownership, and acceptable social behaviour. Cities were an opportunity to produce the best a society could offer, to specialize, compete and excel, in architecture and sculpture, engineering, trade, warfare, and so on. Demonstrations of civic pride would include the acquisition and display of exceptional and interesting curios from nature including impressive collections of animals and plants.

Agriculture catalysed the process of social and economic development that accelerated human control of nature. Cities thrive and grow on the resources provided by trade, fostered through political interaction with other cultures. Warfare generated the competition and conquest that would benefit victors. With urban growth came not only an increase in population but an increase in social complexity and organisation that could take advantage of the benefits of scale and specialization that permit the development of more elaborate technologies, larger armies, and so forth. It is this faltering but inexorable cycle of growth that has created today’s global economic community as, in 2007, UNESCO announced that world-wide city dwellers outnumbered people living in the country and that by 2030 nearly two thirds of the world population would be living in urban areas (United Nations 2006, 2007). The human journey from early cities like Uruk in Mesopotamia in about 4500 BCE to the modern megalopolis has taken about 6,500 years.

It was during the phase of city-building facilitated by agriculture that the category ‘garden’ comes to us as an enclosed (sometimes sacred) and cherished artificial space dedicated to cultivated plants. Classics professor and garden historian Katherine von Stackelberg (2013, p. 120) suggests that it was in the Bronze Age interaction of trade, diplomacy, and military conquest that occurred between Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean during the third to second millennia BCE that ‘… gardens emerge as distinctly meaningful spaces’. These ancient civilizations all had cities with imposing royal gardens and artistically-inspired religious precincts. Here we see the first large-scale parks and gardens associated with royal palaces, temples, and tombs.

A brief account of some of these early gardens provides us with an insight into factors that have fostered the differentiation between gardens and botanic gardens.

People come to gardening from many perspectives: horticulture, history, landscape architecture, landscape studies, environmental history, urban planning, land management.

Australian horticulture has followed the general European gardening tradition with an admixture of Australian nationalism.

Role in society

Plants have long been grown as a source of food but the assembling of plants into substantial collections for artistic, scientific or other purposes has, for most of history, been the pursuit of the leisured, wealthy and educated members of society. The assemblage and maintenance of substantial plant collections requires a large workforce with a depth of knowledge in plants – their geography, botany and cultivation. This requires extensive resources and this is why the history of plants has, until recent times, centred on the estates and gardens of the nobility, coupled with the academic input of an intelligentsia such as that employed by these estates or working in educational institutes, large commercial nurseries, and botanic gardens.

It is only with increasing democratization, including the democratization of education and information, along with the development of suburbia after World War II, that the plant world has become much more accessible to all.

From Fertile Crescent to the Romans

We assume that gardening arrived in Britain with the Romans whose influences can be clearly traced to the Bronze Age civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, and later the civilisations of the Mediterranean and Near East. Of course gardens were just one part of the urban space in these early city states.
We can imagine a gradual transition from the sacred grove to more formal temple or henge-like sites for social gatherings.
Through the Greek and Roman periods can be seen the transfer of the sacred grove of tree trunks out of nature and into the urban and civic sacred environment as the stone temple and its columns, arches connecting the columns sometimes taking on the form of a conopy enclosing the sacred space below, the connection to nature reinforced by entablature of carved acanthus and other leaves and vines.

Gardens & culture

As part of an examination of the beliefs, attitudes and assumptions that arrived in Australia with the early settlers the environmental historian looks first at the way that physical space, the land, is divided up or ‘categorised’ in the mind of the occupier, because it is according to these categories that the land is managed. We know that there was a gulf of difference between the categories/perceptions of the Aboriginal and those of the British settler. Firstly, settlers arrived with the idea that land was either ‘public’ (collectively owned and used) or ‘private’ (owned and used according to the wishes of a single person or small group of people). The question of land and property ownership is discussed here but suffice it to say here that it was the settler idea of land ‘ownership’ (an idea that is alien to the Aborigines in the European sense) that was at the heart of the British policy of terra nullius.
When settlers landed on Australia the entire continent became, effectively, privately owned by the British monarch (the ‘Crown’, King George III), to be divided up according to his wishes, although in practice this devolved onto other entities like parliament, the public service, the Governor and others).
Dialectics
The suite of articles on gardening through the ages in Europe was needed to establish the further categories used by settlers to divide up public and private land, considered here a primary division, together with the reasons for that division and the framework of values that would dictate the broad path for the design of our parks and gardens to the present day. Landscape architect, archaeologist and garden historian Kathryn Gleason identifies three sets of opposing ideas (dialectics) that have driven Western garden culture: pleasure vs utility, public vs private, and informal vs formal. To these three can be added the perhaps presumed overriding tension between nature and culture and its subordinate opposites natural vs artificial, and wild vs cultivated.
If this provides us with a dialectic of ideas and values, then what about the actual design elements, where did they come from? What might at first sight be summarised as Greco-Roman can potentially include a melting pot ofmany cultures: Carthaginians, Egyptians, Etruscans, ?Hittites, Judaeans, Libyans, Lydians, Mesopotamians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Nabataeans, Persians, Phoenicians, and Syrians to name a few. But we can perhaps for the sake of making some headway accept certain accretions. We know for example that at the time of Britain’s Roman occupation there were no gardens there to speak of and that to describe the origins of British gardening as ‘Roman’ is accurate providing we recognise that ‘Roman’ means the accretion of many influences that made up Roman gardening. produced the Roman other influences after the Roman occupation. We know that the powerful Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations would surely have absorbed Much has been written about British garden history to which I can add little if anything. However, in developing this Australian perspective it was clear that it would be necessary to summarise the key practices and ideas that came to Australia from Britain (with all its own cultural accretions) both at the time of settlement and after –key ideas relating especially to the social context of gardens, the elements and ideas of garden design, garden technology, economic botany, the process of plant introduction and distribution, and the general influence of gardening on the wider cultural landscape.
This suite of articles on the British legacy to Australian gardening looks at the major historical periods of British garden history through the lens of the above categories. It is just a brief summary with all the failings of a synthesis that covers both a long period of time and a world of space, but it does provide a ‘quick-reference’ framework of ideas from which to view the future.
These summary articles have drawn heavily on several key British syntheses of the general topic: The Oxford Companion to Gardens, Garden Styles: An Illustrated History of Design and Tradition and The Making of the English Landscape revised and amended by Taylor and Jenny Uglow’s A Little History of British Gardening.
British gardens did not develop in isolation. From their classical beginnings in the gardens of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece and Rome we can see that much of what we are familiar with in our gardens and general urban design has come to us from this Mediterranean melting pot and its resurrection during the Renaissance as reinvigorated old ideas spread across Europe from south to north. Britain, as an isolated island in the north west of Europe, was at the end of this process. Aware of its isolation ideas from the continent were at first borrowed and emulated, first from Italy as interpreter of the great classical era of horticulture and then, often through royal connections, from France, Holland and elsewhere in Europe. The Renaissance was especially important for gardens where ‘… what is immediately striking is the importance that for400 or 500 years was attached to gardens as emblems of status and expressions of taste. Great talents were employed and great resources lavished on projects that, in many cases, would be considered ambitious even with the advantages of modern technology’. Perhaps, since Britain has been such a force in gardening, an ‘outside’ perspective is needed to comment on the next phase of western garden history.
Garden design ideas of the 18th century, the ‘landscape movement’, left an imprint on Britain that remains today. And as British economic and political power increased, so too did its ‘gardening’ status within Europe. Britain, for so long a minor horticultural presence, suddenly had gardening ideas that appealed to Europe’s rich, intelligent and powerful. Britain’s scientists and intellectuals were as capable as those anywhere in Europe and as they sailed out on voyages of distant scientific discovery it also became evident that the British navy would soon rule the waves. Now, resisting continental formality Britain had followed its own path, opting for more relaxed and natural landscapes with less artifice. This new independent approach was viewed from the continent with approval and suddenly among Europe’s rich and powerful there emerged the desire for Le Jardin Anglais. From this point on, Britain’s gardening has not looked back. It was during this period of British ascendancy, when European interest in gardens and plants was at an all-time high (botanophilia), that British feet first stepped on Australian soil. Through the Victorian period of empire the influence Britain had now gained in Europe was to spread across the world – to America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, the East Indies and elsewhere.
English garden historian Edward Hyams makes a revealing remark in his A History of Gardens and Gardening (1971): ‘It might be suspected that the author, being English and writing from an English point of view, is giving more than their proper importance to British gardeners and garden styles. But considerable pains have been taken to refer to French, German and American authorities, and the fact clearly emerges that at this time, while gardens were being made increasingly by the middle-classes as well as by the gentry, in every civilised, properous country in the world they were being made in one, or a mixture, of the styles perfected in the past. Only in Britain and Ireland was the art of gardens still growing towards a conclusion which was by now in sight. [Though in other countries] advances in scientific horticulture were great; but there were none in the art of composing a garden except in Britain.’
Though Britain’s empire has now dissolved, its horticultural legacy has not. Even so, we are now entering a new global phase of history in which British historical influence is strong but its control weak: it is a time for reappraisal.
Gardens as social history
For a style of gardening to be accepted and widely followed, social and economic conditions must be such that the making of gardens in that style is materially possible … Only the existence of quite a large class of rich nobility and gentry in eighteenth-century England made the works of Brown and Repton possible
[Hyams, p. 322] Gardens, as we know them, are surplus to necessity. They are therefore, as they have always been, the domain of people with the time to devote to their planning and organisation, and the labour needed to create and maintain them. To produce gardens of any scale therefore involves the command of considerable forces of energy in the form of creative ideas and manual labour – or, in simple terms, money. Perhaps this is a crude simplification of the story of history itself?
Historically, those people possessing the luxury of excess over necessity in time, creativity, labour, and money have been the most privileged and influential within their communities – the pharaohs, princes and princesses, kings and queens, moghuls, czars, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, emperors and other assorted rulers. It is not surprising then that the history of gardening turns out in many ways to be simply part of the social history of the rich and powerful (see socialladder in TheGreat Chain of Being). How could things be different?
Well, today there are collective administrative bodies like powerful corporations or government authorities like municipal councils, botanic gardens, or forestry commissions that command large areas of public or private space. Sometimes nowadays small private companies are employed to carry out large design works.
The simple point is that gardens reflect social authority structures and that over time there has been a shift from powerful individuals at the head of society to either government authorities or some sort of public or private administrative arm.
‘The modern rich are not leaders in the arts they are followers …'[Hyams, p. 324] As Hyams goes on to point out – now there are rich corporations and affluent municipalities though ‘… the class of small clients for the garden artist is more numerous than ever before’.[H, p. 325] More and more people though desiing a garden are not prepared to sacrifice the time that it demands. Here we now have the small-scale paid gardeners and designers of various kinds creating gardens, not as ‘separate’ spaces but as a pleasing ambience for recreation and relaxation.
As we admire the creative genius of the glorious gardens and walthy lifestyles of the past it seems that there was a moment in in the 1960s history when the horror of sprawling suburban mediocrity was drowning everything. We have certainly paid a price for greater social equality. But we do have choice, something unknown to our ancestors, and nowadays we can enjoy our own creative garden space, maintained by ourselves or not, while having access to simulacra of the great landscaped spaces of the wealthy of yesteryear our parks and botanical gardens. Perhaps that is not so bad.
Economic history
Landscape
The basic elements of the Anglo-European and therefore Neo-European cultural landscapes boil down to the relative proportions of elements within a mosaic pattern of field and hedgerow, hamlet (town) and farm, segmented by lane and road, canal, river and lake. To this can be added a natural landscape consisting of woodland, heaths, moors, fens, mountains, water bodies, and barren land. The process of landscape change entailed the clearing and creation of fields, there are the changing patterns of increasing settlement, introduction of enclosure, and changing approaches to field management.
One result of powerful democratic institutions is that it becomes difficult to target ultimate responsibility because responsibility reflects back on the community itself. If, like Professor Hoskins, we love the natural landscape and deplore modern developments that have devastated it – the airfields, golf courses, super-farms, sprawling towns and cities, featureless factories and industrial estates, and the multi-lane highways that have ‘destroyed cultural meaning or been simply ugly’ (Professor Hoskins & Taylor) then we must look to ourselves rather than ‘faceless planners, mindless civil servants … or wild politicians’. Is democracy a move towards the acceptance of the lowest common denominator?
Gardening in antiquity – summary adding Greece, Mesopotamia, Mycenae, Minoans.
Gather summary information:
Starting afresh, how would we have done things differently or, in other words, what have we learned from history?
In spite of the difficulty of constructing a precise definition of a garden (see ‘On Gardens’) we can nevertheless draw out three repeated general themes: production (vegetables, herbs, fruits); decoration and display; and recreation, relaxation and meditation.
As in other arts, we can view the historical process of garden creation and design as a working through of logical possibilities. In music we have rhythm, melody and pitch along with timbre, metre, dynamics and texture as the basic tools with which to create compositions of sound, and in the course of the history of Western music we can see how, over time, composers have combined these elements in different and new ways. In garden design we have the garden space with a soft landscape of trees, shrubs, and herbs to combine in various ways with a hard landscape of buildings and other hard structures. The conventions of composition though involving general artistic concepts relating to colour, rhythm, texture, balance and so on result in a spectrum of formality and informality based on various elaborations of straight lines and curves with an overall appearance that tends towards or away from natural landscapes. Unlike paintings, gardens are three-dimensional creations that change in time.
Possibilities, though in principle infinite, in practice are constrained by the availability of two key factors: space and labour.
the amount of space available and the seem to s, as in the other arts, to have much already established in antiquity.
In gardening, as in society at large, it seems that throughout history, fashion, ideas, traditions and even values, were the preserve of a small privileged social elite. This is especially evident in the study of garden history. A student soon learns that, so far as Britain is concerned anyway, garden history seems to emanate from the royal court, the gentry and their country estates and, as times became more propitious, a wealthy merchant class. It is tempting to correct this apparent bias by a more systematic exploration of the lives and gardens of the ‘common man’, the people who made up by far the greater part of the population. Sadly, although this story must be told, in so doing it becomes evident that history as ’the story of kings and queens’ has tended to be that way in large part because it was the kings and queens who set the agenda for peoples’ lives – politically, economically, and culturally. Much of British society from the Roman occupation to the twentieth century did not have the means to develop ideas, and it seems fair to say that, anyway, most either accepted the given social order or aspired to the lives of their social betters. Only in the twentieth century can we see the independence of spirit that came with a more general affluence, the relaxation of rigid class barriers, the emancipation of women, and more universal access to education – the democratisation of gardening.

The arrival of gardening in Britain

From Fertile Crescent to the Romans

We assume that gardening arrived in Britain with the Romans whose influences can be clearly traced to the Bronze Age civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, and later the civilisations of the Mediterranean and Near East.  Of course gardens were just one part of the urban space in these early city states.

We can imagine a gradual transition from the sacred grove to more formal temple or henge-like sites for social gatherings.

Through the Greek and Roman periods can be seen the transfer of the sacred grove of tree trunks out of nature and into the urban and civic sacred environment as the stone temple and its columns, arches connecting the columns sometimes taking on the form of a conopy enclosing the sacred space below, the connection to nature reinforced by entablature of carved acanthus and other leaves and vines.

Commentary

As part of an examination of the beliefs, attitudes and assumptions that arrived in Australia with the early settlers the environmental historian looks first at the way that physical space, the land, is divided up or ‘categorised’ in the mind of the occupier, because it is according to these categories that the land is managed. We know that there was a gulf of difference between the categories/perceptions of the Aboriginal and those of the British settler. Firstly, settlers arrived with the idea that land was either ‘public’ (collectively owned and used) or ‘private’ (owned and used according to the wishes of a single person or small group of people). The question of land and property ownership is discussed here but suffice it to say here that it was the settler idea of land ‘ownership’ (an idea that is alien to the Aborigines in the European sense) that was at the heart of the British policy of terra nullius.

When settlers landed on Australia the entire continent became, effectively, privately owned by the British monarch (the ‘Crown’, King George III), to be divided up according to his wishes, although in practice this devolved onto other entities like parliament, the public service, the Governor and others).

Dialectics
The suite of articles on gardening through the ages in Europe was needed to establish the further categories used by settlers to divide up public and private land, considered here a primary division, together with the reasons for that division and the framework of values that would dictate the broad path for the design of our parks and gardens to the present day. Landscape architect, archaeologist and garden historian Kathryn Gleason identifies three sets of opposing ideas (dialectics) that have driven Western garden culture: pleasure vs utility, public vs private, and informal vs formal. To these three can be added the perhaps presumed overriding tension between nature and culture and its subordinate opposites natural vs artificial, and wild vs cultivated.

If this provides us with a dialectic of ideas and values, then what about the actual design elements, where did they come from? What might at first sight be summarised as Greco-Roman can potentially include a melting pot ofmany cultures: Carthaginians, Egyptians, Etruscans, ?Hittites, Judaeans, Libyans, Lydians, Mesopotamians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Nabataeans, Persians, Phoenicians, and Syrians to name a few. But we can perhaps for the sake of making some headway accept certain accretions. We know for example that at the time of Britain’s Roman occupation there were no gardens there to speak of and that to describe the origins of British gardening as ‘Roman’ is accurate providing we recognise that ‘Roman’ means the accretion of many influences that made up Roman gardening. produced the Roman other influences after the Roman occupation. We know that the powerful Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations would surely have absorbed Much has been written about British garden history to which I can add little if anything. However, in developing this Australian perspective it was clear that it would be necessary to summarise the key practices and ideas that came to Australia from Britain (with all its own cultural accretions) both at the time of settlement and after –key ideas relating especially to the social context of gardens, the elements and ideas of garden design, garden technology, economic botany, the process of plant introduction and distribution, and the general influence of gardening on the wider cultural landscape.

This suite of articles on the British legacy to Australian gardening looks at the major historical periods of British garden history through the lens of the above categories. It is just a brief summary with all the failings of a synthesis that covers both a long period of time and a world of space, but it does provide a ‘quick-reference’ framework of ideas from which to view the future.

These summary articles have drawn heavily on several key British syntheses of the general topic: The Oxford Companion to Gardens, Garden Styles: An Illustrated History of Design and Tradition and The Making of the English Landscape revised and amended by Taylor and Jenny Uglow’s A Little History of British Gardening.

British gardens did not develop in isolation. From their classical beginnings in the gardens of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece and Rome we can see that much of what we are familiar with in our gardens and general urban design has come to us from this Mediterranean melting pot and its resurrection during the Renaissance as reinvigorated old ideas spread across Europe from south to north. Britain, as an isolated island in the north west of Europe, was at the end of this process. Aware of its isolation ideas from the continent were at first borrowed and emulated, first from Italy as interpreter of the great classical era of horticulture and then, often through royal connections, from France, Holland and elsewhere in Europe. The Renaissance was especially important for gardens where ‘… what is immediately striking is the importance that for400 or 500 years was attached to gardens as emblems of status and expressions of taste. Great talents were employed and great resources lavished on projects that, in many cases, would be considered ambitious even with the advantages of modern technology’. Perhaps, since Britain has been such a force in gardening, an ‘outside’ perspective is needed to comment on the next phase of western garden history.

Garden design ideas of the 18th century, the ‘landscape movement’, left an imprint on Britain that remains today. And as British economic and political power increased, so too did its ‘gardening’ status within Europe. Britain, for so long a minor horticultural presence, suddenly had gardening ideas that appealed to Europe’s rich, intelligent and powerful. Britain’s scientists and intellectuals were as capable as those anywhere in Europe and as they sailed out on voyages of distant scientific discovery it also became evident that the British navy would soon rule the waves. Now, resisting continental formality Britain had followed its own path, opting for more relaxed and natural landscapes with less artifice. This new independent approach was viewed from the continent with approval and suddenly among Europe’s rich and powerful there emerged the desire for Le Jardin Anglais. From this point on, Britain’s gardening has not looked back. It was during this period of British ascendancy, when European interest in gardens and plants was at an all-time high (botanophilia), that British feet first stepped on Australian soil. Through the Victorian period of empire the influence Britain had now gained in Europe was to spread across the world – to America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, the East Indies and elsewhere.

English garden historian Edward Hyams makes a revealing remark in his A History of Gardens and Gardening (1971): ‘It might be suspected that the author, being English and writing from an English point of view, is giving more than their proper importance to British gardeners and garden styles. But considerable pains have been taken to refer to French, German and American authorities, and the fact clearly emerges that at this time, while gardens were being made increasingly by the middle-classes as well as by the gentry, in every civilised, properous country in the world they were being made in one, or a mixture, of the styles perfected in the past. Only in Britain and Ireland was the art of gardens still growing towards a conclusion which was by now in sight. [Though in other countries] advances in scientific horticulture were great; but there were none in the art of composing a garden except in Britain.’

Though Britain’s empire has now dissolved, its horticultural legacy has not. Even so, we are now entering a new global phase of history in which British historical influence is strong but its control weak: it is a time for reappraisal.

Gardens as social history

For a style of gardening to be accepted and widely followed, social and economic conditions must be such that the making of gardens in that style is materially possible … Only the existence of quite a large class of rich nobility and gentry in eighteenth-century England made the works of Brown and Repton possible

Gardens, as we know them, are surplus to necessity. They are therefore, as they have always been, the domain of people with the time to devote to their planning and organisation, and the labour needed to create and maintain them. To produce gardens of any scale therefore involves the command of considerable forces of energy in the form of creative ideas and manual labour – or, in simple terms, money. Perhaps this is a crude simplification of the story of history itself?

Historically, those people possessing the luxury of excess over necessity in time, creativity, labour, and money have been the most privileged and influential within their communities – the pharaohs, princes and princesses, kings and queens, moghuls, czars, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, emperors and other assorted rulers. It is not surprising then that the history of gardening turns out in many ways to be simply part of the social history of the rich and powerful (see socialladder in TheGreat Chain of Being). How could things be different?

Well, today there are collective administrative bodies like powerful corporations or government authorities like municipal councils, botanic gardens, or forestry commissions that command large areas of public or private space. Sometimes nowadays small private companies are employed to carry out large design works.

The simple point is that gardens reflect social authority structures and that over time there has been a shift from powerful individuals at the head of society to either government authorities or some sort of public or private administrative arm.

‘The modern rich are not leaders in the arts they are followers …'[Hyams, p. 324] As Hyams goes on to point out – now there are rich corporations and affluent municipalities though ‘… the class of small clients for the garden artist is more numerous than ever before’.[H, p. 325] More and more people though desiing a garden are not prepared to sacrifice the time that it demands. Here we now have the small-scale paid gardeners and designers of various kinds creating gardens, not as ‘separate’ spaces but as a pleasing ambience for recreation and relaxation.

As we admire the creative genius of the glorious gardens and walthy lifestyles of the past it seems that there was a moment in in the 1960s history when the horror of sprawling suburban mediocrity was drowning everything. We have certainly paid a price for greater social equality. But we do have choice, something unknown to our ancestors, and nowadays we can enjoy our own creative garden space, maintained by ourselves or not, while having access to simulacra of the great landscaped spaces of the wealthy of yesteryear our parks and botanical gardens. Perhaps that is not so bad.

Economic history

Landscape

The basic elements of the Anglo-European and therefore Neo-European cultural landscapes boil down to the relative proportions of elements within a mosaic pattern of field and hedgerow, hamlet (town) and farm, segmented by lane and road, canal, river and lake. To this can be added a natural landscape consisting of woodland, heaths, moors, fens, mountains, water bodies, and barren land. The process of landscape change entailed the clearing and creation of fields, there are the changing patterns of increasing settlement, introduction of enclosure, and changing approaches to field management.

One result of powerful democratic institutions is that it becomes difficult to target ultimate responsibility because responsibility reflects back on the community itself. If, like Professor Hoskins, we love the natural landscape and deplore modern developments that have devastated it – the airfields, golf courses, super-farms, sprawling towns and cities, featureless factories and industrial estates, and the multi-lane highways that have ‘destroyed cultural meaning or been simply ugly’ (Professor Hoskins & Taylor) then we must look to ourselves rather than ‘faceless planners, mindless civil servants … or wild politicians’. Is democracy a move towards the acceptance of the lowest common denominator?

Gardening in antiquity – summary adding Greece, Mesopotamia, Mycenae, Minoans.

Gather summary information:

Starting afresh, how would we have done things differently or, in other words, what have we learned from history?

In spite of the difficulty of constructing a precise definition of a garden (see ‘On Gardens’) we can nevertheless draw out three repeated general themes: production (vegetables, herbs, fruits); decoration and display; and recreation, relaxation and meditation.

As in other arts, we can view the historical process of garden creation and design as a working through of logical possibilities. In music we have rhythm, melody and pitch along with timbre, metre, dynamics and texture as the basic tools with which to create compositions of sound, and in the course of the history of Western music we can see how, over time, composers have combined these elements in different and new ways. In garden design we have the garden space with a soft landscape of trees, shrubs, and herbs to combine in various ways with a hard landscape of buildings and other hard structures. The conventions of composition though involving general artistic concepts relating to colour, rhythm, texture, balance and so on result in a spectrum of formality and informality based on various elaborations of straight lines and curves with an overall appearance that tends towards or away from natural landscapes. Unlike paintings, gardens are three-dimensional creations that change in time.

Possibilities, though in principle infinite, in practice are constrained by the availability of two key factors: space and labour.

the amount of space available and the seem to s, as in the other arts, to have much already established in antiquity.

In gardening, as in society at large, it seems that throughout history, fashion, ideas, traditions and even values, were the preserve of a small privileged social elite. This is especially evident in the study of garden history. A student soon learns that, so far as Britain is concerned anyway, garden history seems to emanate from the royal court, the gentry and their country estates and, as times became more propitious, a wealthy merchant class. It is tempting to correct this apparent bias by a more systematic exploration of the lives and gardens of the ‘common man’, the people who made up by far the greater part of the population. Sadly, although this story must be told, in so doing it becomes evident that history as ’the story of kings and queens’ has tended to be that way in large part because it was the kings and queens who set the agenda for peoples’ lives – politically, economically, and culturally. Much of British society from the Roman occupation to the twentieth century did not have the means to develop ideas, and it seems fair to say that, anyway, most either accepted the given social order or aspired to the lives of their social betters. Only in the twentieth century can we see the independence of spirit that came with a more general affluence, the relaxation of rigid class barriers, the emancipation of women, and more universal access to education – the democratisation of gardening.

Dividing up space and time in urban situations

With the advent of cities came more complex social interactions and interdependencies. One inevitable consequence of this would have been a greater emphasis on the allocation of two fundamental life resources – space and time. For hunter-gatherers, foragers and herders available space was, in principle, infinite although in reality their movements would have been restricted by other people, food and water supplies and other factors. Even so this kind of freedom was not available within the confines of a fortified city, like the Bronze Age city states of Mesopotamia. Here space was relatively limited and therefore a scarce resource – and of course the way space was allocated depended on how it was expected people would be ‘spending’ their time.

It might be imagined that people from vastly different geographic regions having no contact with one-another might take completely different approaches to the allocation of space and time but there is a remarkable cross-cultural similarity, simply because so much of city life deals with the inescapable basics of living: food, drink, trade, city maintenance, religious ceremony, and family life.

It is perhaps remarkable that gardens, at least as sacred groves or orchards, are recorded in these earliest Mesopotamian cities.

From these earliest plantings has emerged the vast array of gardens of western history. In describing, comparing and classifying this domain of humanity we are answering six simple questions:

Why – what purpose or function does the garden serve, aesthetic, economic etc.?
What – kind of garden is it and of what structures does it consist?;
Where – what is its geographic or ecological location?
How – how is it maintained, what is the management regime and technology used?
When – what historical period and context are we dealing with?
Who – what is the social context ?

Perhaps these questions can be reframed as cultural history, management, typology, meaning.

Population
European population:
c. 130,000 in 23,000 BP
c. 410,000 in 13,000 BP. Tallavara at al. 2015. PNAS 27:2832-8237
Roman Empire c. 200 CE was 50M with 85-90% rural.