The Architect as Garden Designer. The Gardens of Harold Desbrowe-Annear in Victoria 1901

The Architect as Garden Designer. The Gardens of Harold Desbrowe-Annear in Victoria 1901–33

Edquist, Harriet

Melbourne has a significant tradition in landscape and garden design, from its colonial settlement in 1835 to the present time, some of which is wellknown, particularly the Victorian public gardens (pre-eminently the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne) and private mansion gardens that accompanied the 'Boom Style' houses and pastoral estates of the 1870s and 80s.¹ The early twentieth-century private gardens of William Guilfoyle, Director of the Botanic Gardens, such as Dalvui, Noorat 1898 and Mawallok, Beaufort, 1909, both in the pastoral heartland ofVictoria's Western District, are well known as is the inter-war work of Edna Walling (1896–1973), an heroic figure in the mould of Gertrude Jekyll.² Walling, like Jekyll established an audience through her numerous publications and had a large, prosperous practice. Her post-war legacy, in the person of Ellis Stones who began practice with Walling, is also quite well documented. There is still much that we do not know, however, and many landscapes and gardens have yet to be identified and documented. An area of particular interest in the early years of the twentieth century and the inter-war years, is the way in which some architects redefined their role to include the practice of landscape architecture. This is particularly so with those sympathetic to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, which embraced the idea of the house as a total work of art that included the garden within its purview. Architects like the English-born Walter Butler (1864–1949) and Robert Haddon (1866–1929), and the locally trained Harold Desbrowe-Annear (1865–1933) and Rodney Alsop (1881–1932) fall into this category. This paper will examine the work of Desbrowe-Annear whose position as a ‘pioneer’ of modernism was established in the 19405 and 50s by Australia's best-known and most influential architectural critic Robin Boyd.³ Desbrowe-Annear's work as a garden designer has only in recent years become the object of study, however, and the origins and scope of his landscape interests are not yet clear. A number of gardens from 1919 to I933 can be definitely attributed to him, but whether he was responsible for any before this time is a moot point; he was certainly associated with some significant ones.⁴