
From across the seas: the gardenesque at Vaucluse House
Developed by the influential Scottish-born landscape architect John Claudius Loudon, the popular style was a response, in part, to the flood of exotic plants available to Victorian-era gardeners. Displayed as geographically and aesthetically distinct ‘specimens’ to emphasise differences in foliage, flowers and form, the plants on show at Vaucluse House are fascinating examples of a period defined by prosperous ports, imperial politics, seafaring trade networks and exciting scientific discovery. The pleasure garden remains Sydney’s most complete surviving example of the gardenesque over 150 years later.
Cape Town, with its famous central garden established by the Dutch East India Company, was the final port of call for most ships plying the Indian Ocean route from Britain to NSW. When the Second Fleet stopped at the Cape in April 1790, Elizabeth Macarthur (travelling with her pioneering husband, John, settler of Elizabeth Farm) enthusiastically described the beauty of its flora:
In every plant I see something new; these works of nature at the foot of the mountains represent a beautiful shrubbery, where innumerable beautiful flowers & plants delight the eye and regale the senses.[1]
Plants from southern Africa became immensely popular in colonial NSW for their hardiness as well as their beauty. ‘Cape bulbs’ – a group of flowering plants that includes freesias, gladiolus and ixias – were collected with particular avidity. In 1841 William Charles Wentworth displayed Nerine undulata, a bulb from the Eastern Cape Province, at Sydney’s Floral and Horticultural Show.[2]


Bleeding heart vine
Clerodendrum x speciosum
The bleeding heart vine, Clerodendrum splendens, was collected by British naturalist Thomas Whitfield in Sierra Leone in 1839 and propagated in England by nurseryman Joseph Knight. In 1848 William Macarthur requested the climbing plant from London nurserymen Loddiges for his own nursery at Camden Park, outside Sydney, where he successfully propagated the plant by ‘striking’ cuttings (horticultural jargon for encouraging root growth coined by Victorian gardeners).
Today C. x speciosum (a hybrid of C. splendens and C. thomsoniae) grows in the pleasure garden at Vaucluse House. In Australia the showy spring and summer-flowering shrub grows best in warm and humid coastal areas. It does well in part shade, with moist, well-drained soil, but for the best show of flowers it requires full sun.
Native to tropical western Africa
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1851


Agapanthus
Agapanthus praexox
The agapanthus became a favourite addition to English greenhouses after the royal gardeners of William III and Mary II introduced it to Hampton Court Palace in 1692. In her Ladies’ companion to the flower-garden (1841), the popular English garden writer Jane Loudon recommended the ‘Blue African Lily’ as ‘a noble ornament to an architectural terrace, or a fine object on a lawn’, displayed in pots once it had been brought to flower. In NSW, however, the hardy perennials flowered freely: in 1860 English naturalist George Bennett described the agapanthus growing at the Botanic Gardens in Sydney as an ‘interesting exotic’ well suited to the warm climate.
Native to southern Africa
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1843


Bird of paradise
Strelitzia reginae
The bird of paradise plant, with its spectacular orange and blue ‘plumage’, was introduced to the Royal Gardens at Kew in 1773 by the plant hunter Francis Masson, who had sailed to the Cape with James Cook’s Resolution the year before. At Kew, Sir Joseph Banks devised the botanical name of the plant in honour of Queen Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of his patron, King George III.
Native to southern Africa
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1851


Giant honey flower
Melianthus major
This large shrub was introduced to the Botanic Garden in Sydney before 1828, grown as much for its glinting silver serrated leaves as for its spectacular maroon flowers. While it rarely flowers in Europe, Sydney’s warm climate favoured gardeners with considerably more success: at the September 1843 Floricultural and Horticultural Exhibition, the ‘dark blossoms’ of the Melianthus were a notable attraction.
Native to southern Africa
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1843


Pelargonium
Pelargonium sp.
Pelargoniums were among the very first ornamental plants to be introduced to Australia: First Fleet surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth selected the plants at the Cape of Good Hope in October 1787, describing ‘scarlet geraniums [pelagorniums] in full blossom’ in his cabin. By the 1860s Robert Henderson’s Camellia Grove Nursery in Newtown boasted numerous cultivars of the ‘estimable plant’, among them varieties named pandora, lady young, fair Ellen and garibaldi.
Native to southern Africa
Introduced to Sydney in 1788


Clivia
Clivia miniata
Clivias first flowered in Britain in the greenhouses of notable plant collector and breeder Lady Charlotte Clive, Duchess of Northumberland, for whom the genus was named in 1828. Today Clivia miniata, with its dark strap leaves and clusters of brightly coloured flowers, is an Australian gardening staple, tolerating drought well and flowering profusely in the shade. C. nobilis was the first clivia to reach Sydney gardeners, among a ‘splendid collection’ of plants introduced by botanist J C Bidwill from England in 1844. Both species grow in the gardens at Vaucluse House today.
Native to southern Africa
Available to Sydney gardeners after 1844


Belladonna lily
Amaryllis belladonna
These blush-pink autumn flowering bulbs from the Western Cape Province are particularly suited to the Australian climate. According to the 1867 edition of Sydney’s Horticultural Magazine, ‘The family Amaryllis seems to have made this colony their home, and as they are perfectly hardy, we advise their general cultivation’. The species flowers after its leaves have died back, earning the colloquial name ‘naked lady’.
Native to southern Africa
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1843


Plumbago
Plumbago auriculata
London nurseryman James Veitch noted this blue-flowering Cape native growing in William Macarthur’s shrubbery at Camden Park in 1864, alongside plants of sweet bay, oleander and lilac. The scrambling ornamental, popularly grown as an informal hedge, likely arrived in NSW with early ships travelling via the Cape of Good Hope. Plumbago, hardy and fast-growing, flowers almost year-round in Sydney’s long growing season and requires cutting back several times a year.
Native to southern Africa
Available to Sydney gardeners by 1848


Cape honeysuckle
Tecoma capensis
Botanist James Bowie sent seeds of this scarlet-flowering rambling shrub to Kew Gardens in 1823. In NSW, it was a popular choice for shrubberies, with The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser recommending it in 1877 as a ‘goodly shrub’ for winter, grown tall alongside Indian hawthorn and pink, white and crimson-flowered camellias. Like its fellow Cape native, plumbago, it was a popular flowering hedge in the colony – which is how it is grown at Vaucluse House, alongside the carriage loop.
Native to southern Africa
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1843
Plants from Asia, and especially China, have had some of the greatest impact on the character of Sydney gardens. At Vaucluse House a significant collection of 19th-century camellia cultivars is the most obvious Chinese inheritance.
The horticultural treasures of the millennia-long tradition of Chinese gardening were largely unfamiliar to Western gardeners until the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 opened China to official trade channels. Despite the difficulties of access, well-connected NSW gardeners were able to introduce Chinese garden plants early – either from England or directly from the trading ports of Canton (Guangzhou), where foreign merchants were permitted from the mid-18th century, and the Portuguese outpost of Macao. Wild-growing species forms did not generally reach the West until later in the century, when plant hunters such as the famed Robert Fortune looked beyond the cultivated varieties found in Chinese gardens and nurseries.


Shell ginger
Alpinia zerumbet
This tall perennial was introduced to England from the tropical forests of southern China in the 1790s. The ornamental ginger, which grows freely in Sydney gardens, was described by the British Medical and Physical Journal in 1813 as ‘a plant well known in the stoves [greenhouses] of the curious, and certainly a very magnificent one’. With its lush broadleaf foliage and drooping clusters of pink-flushed cream flowers edged in yellow, it is a charismatic and characteristic plant of Sydney gardens.
Native to southern China and east Asia
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1843


Plume poppy
Macleaya cordata
The Scottish botanist and naturalist Robert Brown named the ‘cordate-leaved Macleaya’ for his ‘much valued friend, Alexander Macleay, Esq., Secretary to the Colony of New South Wales, whose merits as a general naturalist, a profound entomologist, and a practical botanist, are well known’. (Brown had unsuccessfully courted Macleay’s daughter Fanny, a botanical illustrator.) Macleay acquired the feathery-flowered specimen for his garden at Elizabeth Bay in 1840.
Native to China and Japan
Introduced to Sydney by 1840


Camellia
Camellia japonica 'Alba Plena'
Camellias sent directly from Canton (Guangzhou) were already growing in the Sydney Botanic Garden by the early 1820s, when they were still a relative novelty in Europe; colonial secretary Alexander Macleay donated another, ‘Alba Plena’, in 1825. This beautiful white formal double, which dates back to the Song dynasty (960–1279), was one of the first Chinese camellias to reach England in the early 1790s. At Vaucluse House, pink and white varieties were planted in a striking alternating pattern and, along with immortelle daisies, famously adorned the coffin of the late William Wentworth.
Chinese cultivar
Introduced to Sydney Botanic Garden in 1825


Azalea
Some of the exotic plants originally grown at Vaucluse House were likely sourced from Michael Guilfoyle’s Exotic Nursery at Double Bay. His 1851 catalogue lists 15 varieties of azalea – flowering members of the Rhododendron genus, whose centre of species diversity is in the Himalayan region. Several varieties of azalea, including this bright fuchsia example, are today cultivated in the pleasure garden at Vaucluse House.
Native to the Himalayan region
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by the 1840s


Cherokee rose
Rosa laevigata
This rapidly growing Chinese rose with waxy white petals, golden stamens and savage thorns had become naturalised throughout the American South by the late 18th century – the origin of its common name. In NSW it was often used for hedging: in 1869, the Sydney Mail praised it as ‘the finest and most economical evergreen hedge in cultivation’; a year earlier horticulturist J W Morton reported planting a hedge a quarter of a mile long at the Tirranna estate in Goulburn. At Vaucluse House, the rose is trained over a wooden structure, in keeping with the gardenesque taste for rustic ornamentation.
Native to southern China
Available to Sydney gardeners by 1843


Wisteria
Wisteria sinensis
Vaucluse House has long been associated with the wisteria entwined around its harbour-facing verandah. The original vine, Japanese wisteria (W. floribunda), was planted sometime after the 1860s and became famous for its springtime display: in 1918 The Sydney Morning Herald described it as ‘a veritable “bit of Japan” set in a dear Old World garden’. Visitors flocked to see it in flower, especially between the 1920s and 40s when its blooms smothered the front of the house. After the vine succumbed to borer in the 1960s it was replaced with W. sinensis, the Chinese wisteria, which Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay had introduced to his garden at Elizabeth Bay in the 1830s.
Native to China
Introduced to Sydney by 1836


Orange jessamine
Murraya paniculata
The sweetly fragranced orange jessamine, also known as mock orange, is a bushy ornamental shrub from south-east Asia and the Indian subcontinent. In 1851 a notice in the The Sydney Morning Herald alerted Sydney gardeners that they could buy the plant and other ‘very rare’ species imported by ship from the interior of Java. The perfumed hedging plant is a ubiquitous sight in contemporary gardens.
Native to south-east Asia and the Indian subcontinent
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1851


Confederate rose
Hibiscus mutabilis
The flowers of this celebrated Chinese hibiscus open white in the morning; by evening, they have deepened to pink. (The common name derives from their former abundance in the American South.) One of the first plants to be introduced from China to Europe, in the early 17th century, the old-fashioned perennial made its way to the Sydney Botanic Gardens directly from Canton (Guangzhou) in the early 1820s.
Native to China
Introduced to Sydney by 1823


Butterfly bush
Buddleja davidii
This central and western-Asian native bears long, narrow cones of densely packed mauve flowers, each with an orange eye. The flowers attract butterflies which feed on the honey-scented nectar. It is a tough, vigorous-growing deciduous shrub with an arching habit. Every winter the Gardens team gives the purple and cream buddlejas at Vaucluse House a hard prune to encourage strong new canes and prevent them becoming overgrown and unkempt.
Native to central and western Asia
Related Buddleja spp. available to Sydney gardeners by 1843


Fried egg plant
Gordonia axillaris
The first Gordonia plants to arrive in England, via the British colony of Penang, were originally classified as camellias due to similarities in flower form and deep green foliage. The glossy-leaved flowering shrub is colloquially known as the fried egg plant because of its frill-edged white petals and golden yellow stamens. Commonly planted in Australia as a suburban street tree, it puts on a winter show when few other plants are in flower.
Native to China, Taiwan and Vietnam
Introduced to Sydney in the late 19th century


Safrano rose
Rosa ‘Safrano’
This tea rose’s scented apricot blooms have flowered in Sydney gardens since at least 1850, when William Macarthur listed ‘Rosa Safranot’ for sale at his nursery at Camden Park. ‘Safrano’ was bred in France in 1839, not long after tea roses were introduced to the West from China, and was the first successful attempt to control parentage by hand pollination. The saffron-coloured buds fade to pale buff as the petals open.
French cultivar, bred from Rosa x odorata ochroleuca ‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1850
The present prevailing taste for botany and horticulture, and the introduction, from other countries, of many new plants … [have] given rise to a school which we call the Gardenesque; the characteristic feature of which, is the display of the beauty of trees and other plants individually.
John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), The landscape gardening and landscape architecture of the late Humphrey Repton, Esq.,1840.
Rio de Janeiro was the First Fleet's second port of call as it travelled from England to New South Wales. In August 1787, Captain Phillip stocked up on cotton, coffee, cocoa, prickly pear, and other crops of economic and agricultural importance from the Portuguese settlement, all of them intended for the future garden at the new penal colony in Sydney.
Ornamental plants from the vast South American continent, with its huge climatic and botanical diversity, were cultivated in the colony from the earliest years, as trading ships continued to ply the Rio–Cape Town–Port Jackson route.


Blue ginger
Dichorisandra thyrsiflora
This lilac flowering, yellow-centred perennial was collected for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew by botanical explorers James Bowie and Allan Cunningham on their 1814–16 Brazilian expedition, shortly before Cunningham was dispatched to NSW (the same expedition also yielded the jacaranda). Not a true ginger, but a Tradescantia relative, the striking subtropical plant was sold at William Macarthur’s Camden Park nursery.
Native to Brazil
Available to Sydney gardeners by 1857


Brazilian plume flower
Justicia carnea
William Macarthur requested this shade-loving Brazilian perennial, along with ‘any other very shewy’ varieties, from the London exotic nursery Loddiges in 1849, and went on to make it commercially available to Sydney gardeners from his nursery at Camden Park. English botanist John Lindley had brought attention to the plant in the 1831 issue of his Botanical Register, commenting on its ‘beauty of foliage’ and ‘constant disposition’ to produce flamingo-pink blooms.
Native to Brazil
Available to Sydney gardeners by 1850


Blue mist flower
Bartlettina sordida
With its springtime display of fluffy pastel-blue flower heads, this unusual and spectacular ornamental shrub makes an eye-catching and exotic addition to the shrubbery at Vaucluse House. Native to the cloud forests of Veracruz, Mexico, it had reached Sydney by 1871, when J Goodenough, gardener to Captain Robert Johnston, displayed a plant (then known as Hebeclinium ianthinum) at the Horticultural Society of NSW. Its ‘splash of lavender-coloured loveliness’ was still drawing attention in a 1948 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Native to Mexico
Introduced to Sydney by 1871


Flame vine
Pyrostegia venusta
This spectacular orange-flowered climber was introduced to the Sydney Botanic Gardens in 1825 from its native Rio de Janeiro. By 1866 the Journal of Botany British and Foreign was describing its ‘elegant festoons of orange-coloured blossoms’ trailing over Sydney garden trellises together with bougainvillea and wisteria. At Vaucluse House, the vine grows over a wirework arch at one of the shrubbery’s entrances.
Native to Brazil
Introduced to Sydney in 1825


Mexican viper
Maurandya barclayana
Charles Darwin observed the twining growth of the Mexican viper in his 1875 work The movement and habits of climbing plants. In 1878 the Illustrated Sydney News recommended the ornamental climber for Sydney’s climate, along with wisteria and plumbago, commenting that ‘plants, which in England require stove or green-house treatment, grow here with a luxuriance quite astonishing’.
Native to Mexico
Available to Sydney gardeners by 1843


Sandpaper vine
Petrea volubilis
The sandpaper vine, named for its roughly textured leaves, was introduced to Europe from Mexico at the end of the 18th century. In 1875 the British Journal of Horticulture, Cottage Gardener and Country Gentleman endorsed the showy two-tone flowered climber, writing that it had fallen out of fashion ‘while the ends of the earth are being ransacked in search of new plants’. In Sydney, nurseryman Thomas Shepherd listed it for sale at the Darling Nursery in 1851.
Native to Mexico
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1851


Tree fuchsia
Fuchsia aborescens
Seeds of the deep pink-flowering tree fuchsia were first transported from Mexico to England in 1824. In 1886, The Gardeners’ Chronicle described ‘a large profusely flowered specimen’, planted out in the cool conservatory at the Surrey home of George Macleay, son of botanical collector and NSW colonial secretary Alexander Macleay. George, also a natural history enthusiast, inherited Elizabeth Bay House and its surrounding gardens in 1865. It grows on the west side of the verandah at Vaucluse House.
Native to Mexico
Available to Sydney gardeners by 1860s


Violet churcu
Iochroma cyaneum
This hummingbird-pollinated shrub was collected in Ecuador for the London Horticultural Society by German botanist Karl Theodor Hartweg in the 1830s. In 1874 Melbourne’s Weekly Times wrote it was ‘well worth growing in shrubberies, being a strong-growing plant, with dark blue tube-shaped flowers in bunches, and nearly always in flower’.
Native to South America
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1850


Dahlia
Dahlia cv.
In 1836 colonial secretary Alexander Macleay received a consignment of dahlias from London, among them the evocatively named Bey of Algiers, Dutch White, Fringed Crimson and Black Turban. Dahlias were hugely popular in the 19th century 1800s, with plant breeders enthusiastically cultivating the gorgeous Mexican blooms to create an explosion of horticultural varieties. In 1864 the Sydney-published Horticultural Magazine praised ‘the brilliant and infinite variety of [the dahlia’s] splendid colours, combined with its easy management, growing and flowering in every soil and in every climate’.
Native to Mexico
Available to Sydney gardeners by the 1830s


Snail vine
Vigna caracalla
The snail vine, named after its violet curlicue petals, was introduced to Europe from South America by the Portuguese and cultivated by the royal gardeners at Hampton Court Palace as early as 1690. Sydney horticulturist William Macarthur listed it for sale at his Camden Park nursery in 1857.
Native to tropical South and Central America
Commercially available to Sydney gardeners by 1857


Marvel of Peru
Mirabilis jalapa
Colonial botanist Charles Fraser first noted the marvel of Peru growing in the Sydney Botanic Gardens in 1827, describing its ‘perfect’ acclimatisation to the region. The fragrant ornamental perennial, popularly known as the four o’clock plant, bears multi-coloured flowers in red, pink, yellow, and white, which open during the late afternoon and continue to bloom until morning.
Native to Peru and Central America
Growing in the Botanic Gardens, Sydney in 1827


Heliotrope
Heliotrope arborescens
Famed for its delightful vanilla fragrance, the cherry pie plant was received by NSW colonial secretary Alexander Macleay in 1837 from Loddiges Nursery. In June 1841 Elizabeth Macarthur wrote to her eldest son of the sweet perennial shrub, a favourite with butterflies, growing at their Elizabeth Farm homestead: ‘Your sisters are just returned from a walk in the Garden – they bring Camellias … the Garland flower & Heliotrope’. The plant flowers almost year round in Sydney’s warm climate.
Native to Peru
Received at Elizabeth Bay House in 1837
Related exhibitions
Museum of Sydney
Botanical ArtWednesday 6 July 2016
In the winter of 2016, Sydney Living Museums presented two botanical art exhibitions at the Museum of Sydney: Florilegium: Sydney’s Painted Garden and The Artist & the Botanical Collector: the...