Heritage significance and executive director recommendation to the

ASSESSMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCE

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S ASSESSMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCE [s.34A(2)(d)]

The University of Melbourne System Garden is not of state level significance, but may be of potential local significance. This place is likely to be of cultural heritage significance to the University of Melbourne.

DESCRIPTION

The University of Melbourne System Garden covers an approximately 0.6ha (1.5 acre) area in the north-west corner of the University of Melbourne’s main campus at Parkville. It is located to the south of Tin Alley and is most easily accessed from the south-east via a pedestrian path linking it to Professors Walk. The System Garden is irregular in shape but contains a roughly rectangular 70m by 65m core area almost completely enclosed by buildings with north-south or east-west orientations on each of its four sides. These buildings include:

• 
  The east edge: Botany School building (1929) and its 1944 southerly and 1962 northerly extensions;
  
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  The north edge: Botany North Extension building (2002);
  
• 
  The west edge: Agriculture School building (1922), its 1949 and 1961-62 southerly extensions, and the later northerly ‘New Agriculture Building’ – also known as ‘Institute of Land and Food Resources’; and
  
• 
  The south edge: Zoology building (1988), and the ‘potting shed’ building to its immediate east.
  

The southern portion of the garden contains an octagonal plan-form tower – of approximate outside diameter 3.5m – with white-painted brick walls. This c.1866 tower’s bell-cast roof form is also octagonal, with concave lead-capped ridges at the junctions of its eight slate-clad faces and a decorative iron finial on the roof’s apex.

The System Garden contains 21 separate planting beds interspersed with areas of lawn, and also a small network of pedestrian paths. Five of these beds – together with radial and concentric lines of clay bricks set in the grass surrounding and centred on the tower – are the legacy of an interpretive mid-1980s partial reconstruction of the Garden’s original layout of paths and beds. Three separate shallow ponds containing aquatic plants are located on the tower’s south-east side.

Looking from the south-east at the remnant central tower of the System Garden Conservatory, with shallow ponds in the foreground and the 1922 Agriculture School building behind [January 2017]

Fifteen of the Garden’s current 21 beds contain plants grouped by botanical affinity at a sub-class level according to the Cronquist botanical classification system. The other beds contain broadly thematic plantings and some experimental and research plots. These new beds and ancillary areas have been configured to incorporate the oldest plantings in the System Garden area. Some of these – such as the three large Palm trees to the north-west of the tower, the Maclura pomifera (Osage Orange) tree to the south-west and the Cordyline australis (Cabbage-palm) to the tower’s north – appear to be surviving specimens of the Garden’s nineteenth century layout. There are five likely nineteenth century trees, and a further twelve early-twentieth century trees.

Plan of the System Garden showing its 70m by 65m core area (orange line), nineteenth century fabric and trees (blue)

and early-twentieth century trees (pink). Source: Lovell Chen, July 2011, CMP, p.68

In the north-west corner, a brushwood fence with two sets of hinged twin-leaf gates screens and encloses an area which contains a large above-ground corrugated steel water tank and a service compound.

Looking west from the west end of the 2002 Botany North Extension building [January 2017]

RELEVANT INFORMATION

Local Government Authority	City of Melbourne
HERITAGE LISTING INFORMATION
Heritage Overlay:	HO355. This HO covers the remnant central tower of former conservatory building.
Environmental Significance Overlay	Group 5 (G5) Melbourne University System Garden (Environmental Significance Overlay – Schedule 2) 68 Phoenix dactylifera, Date Palm 69 Taxodium distichum, Swamp Cypress 70 Grevillea robusta, Silky Oak 71 Ficus platypoda, Rock Fig 72 Maclura pomifera, Osage Orange 73 Brachychiton discolour, White Kurrajong (or Queensland Lace Bark) 74 Jubea chilensis, Chilean Wine Palm 75 Catalpa bignonioides, Indian Bean Tree 76 Taxodium mucronatum, Montezuma Cypress 77 Phoenix canariensis, Canary Island Date Palm 78 Eucalyptus saligna, Sydney Blue Gum
Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Register:	No
Heritage Overlay Controls:	External Paint: Yes Internal Alteration: No Tree: No
Other listings:
The National Trust of Victoria (Australia) Register of Significant Trees of Victoria Maclura pomifera, Osage Orange (File No. T11864). The City of Melbourne, Exceptional Tree Register The 11 trees listed above which are subject to an Environmental Significance Overlay are also identified in the City of Melbourne, Exceptional Tree Register.

HISTORY

CONTEXTUAL HISTORY

System gardens

A ‘system garden’ – in countries other than Australia often instead called a ‘class ground’ or ‘teaching garden’ – is a formal garden set out for teaching a particular system of botanical classification. System gardens differ from botanic gardens because of their narrower purpose, and as such are designed and arranged very formally. A system garden contains a collection of ‘systematic beds’ (alternatively described as ‘order beds’ or ‘family beds’) in which plants are carefully grouped to demonstrate their taxonomic resemblances.

System gardens sometimes stand alone, but are most commonly components within much larger botanic gardens. In Europe they often evolved from sixteenth to eighteenth-century university or institution-linked gardens that originally catered for medical or botanical studies. The plants in these gardens were often only attractive only during certain seasons. The opening to the public of such gardens from the late eighteenth century onward, with pressure to provide layouts and attractive planting to encourage year-round recreational use, complicated their management. The evolving need for botanic gardens to combine aesthetics, public space and readily-understood educational content and maintain their original specialised botanical education purpose led to conflicts. An adaptive design approach, applied particularly from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, kept systematic beds as a feature within larger botanic gardens and divorced them from the surrounding gardens’ increasingly aesthetic focus.

There are three system gardens in Victoria, and at least fifteen elsewhere in the world. From 1857 to 1874 there was a 1.2 hectare (3 acre) System Garden founded by Ferdinand von Mueller within the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, of which no traces now remain. Internationally, systems gardens have been established in England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Scotland and Sweden and examples still exist in each of these countries.

Systematic beds are most often rectangular and laid out in grids. Notable exceptions to this occurred at the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew (London) and at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, which were laid out in curving and irregularly-shaped island beds; at St Andrews Botanic Gardens (trapezoidal and triangular beds); Uppsala University (flower-shaped beds); and Utrecht University Botanic Gardens (hexagonal beds).

Frederick McCoy

The University of Melbourne System Garden was founded by Frederick McCoy (1823-1899). McCoy studied paleontology and natural history in Dublin. Following his prodigious publication of articles in academic journals, McCoy in 1849 became Professor of Geology and Mineralogy and curator of the museum at Queen's College, Belfast. In the early 1850s McCoy befriended John Stevens Henslow, the Professor of Botany at Cambridge under whose direction the new Botanic Garden there was being developed.

From 1855 McCoy was the Foundation Professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He lectured in the general laws of chemistry, in mineralogy, elements of botany, comparative anatomy and physiology of animals, systematic zoology and 'Systematic and Practical Geology with some Paleontology'.

McCoy used his dual roles as University Professor and Museum Director to continue to publish, and assembled one of the finest natural history collections outside Europe and North America. However his reputation has been diminished by his unremitting opposition to Darwin's theories. Several protracted public quarrels in which he was involved have also drawn attention away from his many achievements.

Edward La Trobe Bateman

The University of Melbourne System Garden was designed and set out by Edward La Trobe Bateman (1816-1897). Born in Yorkshire, Bateman was a cousin of Victoria’s first Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe. Edward La Trobe Bateman was a gifted artist and designer, knowledgeable in botany, architecture (including glass-houses), hydraulic and civil engineering, medieval manuscript illumination, and landscaping.

Landscape and botanical art, with a view to publication, comprised the bulk of Bateman’s earliest work in Australia. In time, necessity demanded that he also adopt a more lucrative occupation and turning to what he termed ‘ornamental gardening’ Bateman designed at least twenty public and private gardens in Victoria.

Bateman prepared designs for the grounds of the University of Melbourne (during c.1855-64) and the University’s Botanic Garden (1856-57), and also for Williamstown Botanic Gardens (1856), Fitzroy Gardens (1856-57) and Carlton Gardens (1856-57). He also had a part in the original planning of St Vincent Gardens in South Melbourne (1857) and Government House Garden (1864).

Alfred Ewart

The University of Melbourne System Garden exists in the present day as a result of the sustained advocacy of Alfred James Ewart (1872-1937). In 1906 Ewart took up the foundation chair of Botany and Plant Physiology at the University of Melbourne, the first chair of Botany in an Australasian university. He was simultaneously appointed Government Botanist by the Victorian government. These twin roles were not without difficulties but Ewart's exceptional energy and his activity as a teacher and a scientific researcher contributed to his building the Botany School from humble beginnings to a major department within the University of Melbourne.

Professor Ewart’s keen interest in the University of Melbourne System Garden area served to check the destruction of its surviving trees and shrubs but also introduced a new approach for its use. Throughout his tenure Ewart fostered the System Garden’s retention for ‘experimental’ rather than systematic planting.

HISTORY OF PLACE

Conception and planned scope

The University of Melbourne System Garden was established in 1856. Throughout the nineteenth century it was known as the University’s ‘Botanic Garden’. It was from its foundation a very carefully designed system garden, but the term ‘system garden’ was not used in connection with it until the early twentieth-century.

Edward La Trobe Bateman’s landscape design work at the University of Melbourne during 1856 included the design of its Botanic Garden. He undertook this with Professor Frederick McCoy. McCoy’s conceptual inspiration was almost certainly the ‘circular system’ of botanical classification developed by John Lindley (1799-1865) and published by him in works such as The Vegetable Kingdom (1846) – a book which McCoy prescribed for his botany students at Melbourne. At that time it was widely believed that a correctly constructed botanical system would as a corollary allow nature to reveal its own ‘shape’ via the form that such a system took. Many analogies were tested by botanists, including grids, archipelagoes, genealogical trees, constellations, and three-dimensional pyramids.

In July 1856, McCoy spoke publicly of his intention to create ‘a strictly scientific Botanic Gardens for class purposes’, in which ‘grim precision and gridiron-like order’ would showcase

a good collection, illustrative of all the natural Classes, Orders, and most of the Families, and many of the Genera of plants, arranged with the systematic precision of the leaves of a book, and fully labelled in the way adopted by my friends Professor Henslow and Mr Babington in the new University Botanic Garden at Cambridge.

Many years later in 1875, McCoy’s own description of the University’s Botanic Garden and its intended use is again helpful in understanding its design:

Each order has a bed for itself, the aquatic orders being exhibited in sunk tanks in their proper places in relation to terrestrial kinds instead of the usual practice of putting them all in one reservoir. Even the Sea Weeds I kept growing for many years to demonstrate the relations of the lowest form of vegetation to the highest.

The highly-structured nature of the University Botanic Garden was also born of McCoy’s desire to demonstrate to his students the botanical classification system devised by John Hutton Balfour (1808-84), a system which McCoy himself favoured. It is clear from McCoy’s numerous public statements that he intended the Botanic Garden at the University of Melbourne to be a representation of the entire plant kingdom in microcosm – and he used it as a giant, living, visual aid to his teaching. The design solution which Edward La Trobe Bateman put forward was for a circular area – a formal scientific and landscape feature, rather than a recreational garden – of about 1.5ha (3.7 acres).

Creation of the ‘Botanic Garden’

Edward La Trobe Bateman set out the University Botanic Garden in the first half of 1857 over four days spent ‘marking out walks, taking levels, & fixing level pegs in and around’ its area. A considerable amount of prisoner labour was employed in digging over the ground in 1857-58. In June 1859 the work of carting topsoil into the area, digging large quantities of manure into the ground and trenching the Garden beds began. At the end of 1859, a branch pipe from the Yan Yean water supply was connected to the Garden.

By the end of 1861, the Botanic Garden’s layout was reasonably complete, and fully enclosed with access provided via two gates. By 1865 the Garden’s plantings and its surrounding dense Acacia lophanta hedge were well-established, although work on the features of the outer border continued over several years.

Other small outbuildings and structures – such as a 20sqm heated ‘Propagating Pit’ building, its abutting Tool House and Potting Shed, Fern Houses, Plant Sheds and Shelters, Glass Frames, and Stables for the University’s work-horses – were built during the Garden’s operation in the nineteenth century, but none of these have survived.

The central Conservatory

In 1866 work began on the first of an eventual six stages of the construction of the University Botanic Garden’s central Conservatory building. Its completion in May 1875 provided McCoy with a means of exhibiting plants which required protection and heat in winter and thus could not be grown in the open air.


The central tower is all that remains from this once impressive conservatory built in the Indo-Saracenic style.

c.1873, based on the known construction dates of the Central Conservatory’s stages.

Source: History page, UoM ‘System Garden’ website.

The completed ‘Botanic Garden’

In 1875 the circle-shaped University of Melbourne Botanic Garden together with its outer 4.5m-wide roadway covered a total area of approximately 1.5ha (3.7 acres). Measured from the roadway’s outside edges through the centre of the circles, the entire Botanic Garden area had a diameter of approximately 137m (450 feet). The formal Garden itself, enclosed within its continuous hedge, had an outside diameter of 103m (340 feet) and thus covered an area of approximately 0.84ha (2.1 acres). Between the hedge and the outer roadway was a ring of open space in which it seems pine trees were planted. To the north-west beyond the outer edge of the roadway was a group of small outbuildings and structures associated with the Garden’s operation. Within the hedge, concentric paths approximately 2.3m (7½ feet) wide alternated with three concentric rings of beds each approximately 9m (30 feet) wide. These concentric rings contained segments of varying size divided radially by other paths. At the centre of the Garden was an island 24m (80 feet) in diameter, surrounded by a ‘water circle’ or moat, approximately 2.3m (7½ feet) wide. On this island stood the octagonal glass Conservatory, itself approximately 16.5m (55 feet) in diameter.

Reconstruction by historian Anne Neale of the Botanic Garden at the University of Melbourne, as laid out by Edward La Trobe Bateman from 1856. Source: Illustrations, Australian Centre, p.190

Decline and re-purposing of the System Garden

The Botanic Garden fell into disuse over the last two decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In the wake of the 1890s economic depression, the University Council in 1894 decided to sell the Garden’s plants and buildings (including the large conservatory) by auction but it is unclear whether such a sale proceeded. The central Conservatory stood neglected until 1916 when its glasshouse bays were dismantled.

There was no leadership in Botany at the University of Melbourne after McCoy’s departure until the arrival in 1906 of the foundation Professor of Botany, Alfred James Ewart. Some time just before or after Ewart’s appointment, the name ‘System Garden’ began to be used to describe the area of the original University Botanic Garden.

A University of Melbourne site plan of 1896 with the System Garden (at this time still known as the University Botanic Garden) shaded green. Its paths and beds, moat, and central conservatory were recorded on this plan, which was part of a Melbourne-wide survey by the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works (M&MBW) prepared as part of the scheme to sewer the metropolis. Source: History page, UoM ‘System Garden’ website.

In 1916 a rectangular-plan glasshouse using some of the original Conservatory’s dismantled fabric was built, attached to the south-east face of its brick tower. This glasshouse was in turn demolished during the 1950s.

The University of Melbourne eventually permitted the perimeter of the System Garden to accommodate new buildings for the Schools of Agriculture (1922) and Botany (1929) and their later additions. Parts of the System Garden were grassed, others were turned over to experimental plots, and small structures such as glasshouses, animal cages, insectaria and potting sheds were built. The Garden’s research and teaching uses, associated with Botany to its east side and Agriculture to the west, were combined with passive recreation.

From 1937 a series of other buildings further intruded into the area of the System Garden from all sides. Within the circle of the former System Garden the area south of the old Conservatory’s brick tower became the favoured location for glass houses and other structures. In the present day almost all of the south half of the original System Garden land area is now given over to buildings and their access paths and roads (see diagram on page 21)

Resurrection and reconstruction of the System Garden

Bricks and small areas of flagstone paving were set into the University of Melbourne System Garden’s lawns in the early to mid-1980s to mark the positions of some of the original radial and circular path edges.

c.1935: showing the two large buildings of Agriculture (lower left) and Botany (upper centre) now on either side of the System Garden, breaking the circle of its hedge and facing the old circular roadway. Also visible is the rectangular glasshouse abutting the old octagonal tower’s south-east side.

Source: History page, UoM ‘System Garden’ website.

In the 1990s the System Garden regained some area in its north-west corner following the demolition of the 1937-38 Registrar’s House. Also during this decade a ‘resurrection’ by University staff of the Garden’s systematic purpose began, based upon the Cronquist system. This process continues into the present day.

To mark the 160th anniversary of the founding of the System Garden, the University of Melbourne hosted a series of lectures, tours and activities at the Garden from Sunday 23 to Tuesday 25 October 2016.

The 1896 M&MBW plan superimposed on a site plan of the University’s present-day buildings and grounds.

This green circle covers an area identical to the one in the University of Melbourne site plan on page 20.

Source: Source: Illustrations, Australian Centre, p.255 (green shading and bold-line edges to buildings added by HV)

Construction details

System Garden plantings, beds, paths/roadway and moat

Architect name: Edward La Trobe Bateman

Architectural style name: N/A

Builder name: Unknown

Construction started date: first half of 1857

Construction ended date: ‘well established’ by 1865

Conservatory building

Architect name: Edward La Trobe Bateman with architects Reed & Barnes

Architectural style name: Indo-Saracenic (‘Gothic for the tropics’)

Builder name: not known

Construction started date: November 1866 (first of six separate stages)

Construction ended date: May 1875 (final of the six stages)

Date partially dismantled: 1916

VICTORIAN HISTORICAL THEMES

06 Building towns, cities and the garden state

6.2 Creating Melbourne

08 Building community life

8.2 Educating people

09 Shaping cultural and creative life

9.5 Advancing knowledge

INTEGRITY/INTACTNESS

Intactness

The intactness of the place is low [February 2017].

Integrity

The integrity of the place is low [February 2017].

The University of Melbourne System Garden has experienced a dramatic loss of intactness and integrity. It has been subject to extensive alteration, remodelling and loss of important elements and features throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The Garden’s footprint from the 1860s-80s period has been substantially diminished by the encroachment of buildings around its perimeter on all sides. A broad-scale, incremental and ongoing remodelling of the System Garden’s beds and plantings has also taken place during the 110 years leading up to the present day. The resulting changes have disguised the Garden’s original form and character, and significantly compromise the degree to which its heritage values can be understood and appreciated. Although the former Conservatory’s remaining octagonal central tower is relatively intact, it is irrevocably divorced from its designed purpose as the hub of a large octagonal glasshouse complex.

• 
  See ‘A note on Intactness and Integrity’ on page 3.
  
• 
  See ‘List of the features and elements that have been demolished, lost or removed’ on page 3.
  

CONDITION

The University of Melbourne System Garden’s present-day planting beds, lawns, trees and shrubs are in very good condition and receive sustained and close attention from the University’s staff and students. The remaining fabric of the octagonal tower, formerly the hub of the Garden’s central conservatory, is also very well maintained. Overall the place is in good condition [February 2017].

COMPARISONS

1. Places associated with the study and teaching of botany

The significant plantings, settings and associated teaching/research and accommodation facilities at other places much better illustrate an association with the study and teaching of botany than the University of Melbourne System Garden.

Burnley Gardens (VHR H2052) and Horticultural College

Burnley is historically significant as Victoria and Australia's first school of horticulture. The 8.2ha Burnley Gardens were first laid out as grounds for the public in 1860. Layers of development still clearly show some of the original axial layout, and the contrasting landscape style employed by the school’s first principal Charles Luffman from 1899, to produce a landscape of originality and diversity. The Gardens exhibit outstanding landscape qualities, with large sweeping lawns dotted by mature specimen trees and palms, two lily ponds edged with pollarded Crack Willows, serpentine gravel paths, richly planted shrubberies, an Ellis Stones Rockery and an Australian native garden incorporating several remnant River Red Gums. The plantings of contrasting deciduous and evergreen trees, palms, conifers, shrubberies, rose garden, cactus garden, and Australian native garden provide an outstanding landscape of plant variety and colour, and seasonal interest. Burnley forms a valuable recreation, education and research facility.

Creswick School of Forestry (VHR H1511)

The first of its kind in Australia, the School was established in 1909 on a site adjacent to the Victorian State Nursery and Plantation at Saw Pit Gully. Creswick developed as a town after gold was discovered in the vicinity in 1851, and deep lead mines were worked there from the 1870s. Such activity led to the destruction of much of the forest in the Creswick area by gold miners and timber splitters, and resulted in the protection of forest land in Creswick in 1871. By the late 1880s Creswick forest land was placed under the control of the forester, John La Gerche, who began experimental plantings in Creswick and established a State nursery at nearby Saw Pit Gully in 1888. In the 1890s land around this nursery was used for experimental pine plantations, and in 1908 it was established as the Victorian State Nursery and Plantation.

Together with the State Nursery and pine plantations, the School of Forestry forms part of an important precinct in an area that became central to Victoria’s forestry industry, and important to Australia’s forestry industry, in the twentieth century.

Accommodation buildings at Creswick campus.

The National Herbarium of Victoria at the Royal Botanic Gardens (VHR H1459)

The Royal Botanic Gardens and National Herbarium are of scientific significance as the centre of botanic research, plant acclimatization and species introduction into Victoria. The National Herbarium was founded by Ferdinand von Mueller in 1853 when he was appointed the first Government Botanist of Victoria.

The State Botanical Collection at the National Herbarium comprises a collection of approximately 1.5 million dried plant, algae and fungi specimens from all around the world. The majority of the collection is Australian, with a particular emphasis on the flora of Victoria. The collection is rich in historical specimens and foreign-collected specimens: about half of the specimens were collected before 1900, and one third were collected overseas. In 1934 the collection was transferred into the current Herbarium building within the Royal Botanic Gardens, prior to the demolition of its former home in an 1861 building in Kings Domain near the Shrine of Remembrance. An extension was added in 1989 to house the ever-growing collection.

The Herbarium collection consists mainly of pressed and dried plant specimens mounted on archival paper, but it also contains photographs, microscope slides and collections preserved in alcohol. The collection is housed in rows of metal cabinets and is arranged systematically. The specimens are accessed by staff botanists and visiting researchers for taxonomic, historical and ecological research.

The National Herbarium of Victoria building extension, built in 1989.

Source: National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria website

2. System Gardens

Monash University Systems Garden at Clayton campus (not in VHR)

Approximately 0.29ha in area (approximately 55 by 50m) the Monash University Systems Garden was created in the 1970s by Robert McClure and Graeme McGregor, the University's garden curators at the time. On a campus predominantly planted with Australian natives, the Systems Garden instead showcases plants from around the world, labelled and set out according to their Family groupings. In 2009, the Systems Garden was substantially refurbished. The garden features many unusual trees including Gingko biloba (Maidenhair), Erythrina vespertilio (Bat's Wing Coral Tree) and a Kigelia Africana (African Sausage Tree). The Bat's Wing Coral Tree is recognised as a Significant Tree by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria).

Monash University’s Systems Garden. Source: Systems garden, Monash University website.

Ballarat School of Mines (VHR H1463)

Like the University of Melbourne System Garden, the Botanical Garden at the former Ballarat School of Mines was described as a ‘system garden’ from the early twentieth century. Between 2007 and 2012 Federation University TAFE Rural Science students worked towards restoring the Garden’s plantings based on its 1920s design. The students conducted historical research into the garden layout and planting using primary source documents, and used the evidence they gathered to inform their restoration.

Established in 1879 as a resource for teaching at the School, from the outset the Garden was very closely associated with pharmaceutical chemistry and materia medica. The area of the School of Mines Botanical Garden was substantially reduced during the years c.1899-1919 as new School buildings were erected adjacent to it. The Plumbing and Wiring Shop building of 1918-19 encroached upon the Garden’s northern edge, and the retaining walls constructed along that building’s southern and western faces led to the modification of much of the original Garden’s extent and form.

The remnant Garden area is still maintained on a site approximately 23 by 35m within the current Federation University campus. The present-day Garden little resembles the formal Botanical Garden as first established. It now consists of a series of terraces leading down what was an escarpment from Lydiard Street to Albert Street. A brick-paved spinal pathway leads direct from the Administration Buildings to Albert Street, and paths and gardens run perpendicular to this spine.

The present-day oldest plantings at the Ballarat School of Mines former Botanical Garden are these 1920s-era trees

Source: John Patrick, Statement of Heritage Impact, p.8

3. Public gardens in Victoria designed by Edward La Trobe Bateman

The University of Melbourne System Garden is one of at least ten public gardens designed by Edward La Trobe Bateman in the 1850s and 60s. These include his original design for the Carlton Gardens, which is now part of the World Heritage listed Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens (VHR 1501).

Williamstown Botanic Gardens (VHR H1803)

The four hectare Williamstown Botanic Gardens was opened in 1860 as a public park and botanic garden. The creation of the gardens was largely due to the efforts of the citizens of Williamstown who lobbied the Williamstown Council to persuade the State Government to set aside the land and then contributed to its early development through the donation of plants. Plants were also donated by Ferdinand von Mueller, first Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Daniel Bunce, first curator of the Geelong Botanic Gardens.

Williamstown Botanic Gardens was laid out c.1856 by Edward La Trobe Bateman and his still-extant design incorporates wide, gently serpentine paths around the site’s boundaries and narrower curvilinear paths within, dividing it into a series of irregular beds of varying sizes. An additional two wide straight paths run north-south and east­west, intersecting at right angles and dividing the park into quarters. The Gardens are aesthetically significant for their excellent design and for the elegant execution of that design within a small, flat site. Important facets of the layout are the major north-south and east-west axes, the vista to Hobsons Bay, the impressive central palm avenue, the major focal point around the AT Clarke statue, and the deliberately enclosed nature of the site which enhances the wide variety of internal views and spatial experiences within the framework of the formal layout. Williamstown Botanic Gardens are also of historical, scientific (horticultural) and social significance to the State of Victoria.

Aerial photo of Williamstown Botanic Gardens. Source: Google Maps.

Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens (VHR H1501)

Superintendent Charles La Trobe first set aside the 26 hectare (64 acre) site of the Carlton Gardens in 1839 as part of the green belt encircling Melbourne which included Batman Hill, Flagstaff Gardens, Fitzroy Gardens, Treasury Gardens and the Domain. The original layout of the Gardens was designed by Edward La Trobe Bateman and dates to 1856.

Later substantial redesign and planting at Carlton Gardens took place under the direction of the State's leading landscape designers and horticulturists, including Clement Hodgkinson, William Sangster, Nicholas Bickford, John Guilfoyle and architect Joseph Reed. Reed – and Sangster, who was also a nurseryman – worked in conjunction to ensure a suitable setting for the 1879-80 Royal Exhibition Building, replanning the gardens, paths, entrances and other features.

4. Private gardens in Victoria designed by Edward La Trobe Bateman

There is good evidence that Edward La Trobe Bateman favoured the use of large circular plans in his garden designs. In the pleasure garden he designed for the Howitt family at Barragunda, Cape Schanck (c.1865) and in the orchard and kitchen garden at Rippon Lea, Elsternwick (c.1868), circle forms were employed. Bateman designed at least ten private gardens during the 1850s and 60s, some of which are at places now listed in the Victorian Heritage Register. These gardens include:

Wooriwyrite Homestead, garden at Kolora in the Western District, mid-to-late 1860s

Barragunda (VHR H0615) garden at Cape Schanck on the Mornington Peninsula, 1865-66

Heronswood (VHR H0664) garden at Dromana on the Mornington Peninsula, 1864-69

Rippon Lea (VHR H0614) garden at Elsternwick, 1868-69

Repeated nineteenth-century references from prosperous Victorian settlers and colonists to Edward La Trobe Bateman’s ‘many’ private landscape design commissions suggest that the ten private properties presently known for their Bateman gardens probably represent only a fraction of his work in the State. Other examples with intact fabric may exist.