Gardening is as old as the British settlement of Australia, but its popularity among the expanding middle classes has blossomed throughout the continent over the last forty years. The annual guide published by Australia’s Open Garden Scheme with the ABC, and Louise Earwaker and Neil Robertson’s The Open Garden (2000), attest to the variety of gardening styles practised today.

Garden history, however, is a new discipline. Its practitioners, in contrast to the mass of amateur gardeners, are a select, professional group: in the main architects, historians or heritage officials. They form part of the Australian clerisy, Coleridge’s term which deserves to be more widely employed. The Australian Garden History Society (founded in 1980) joined with Oxford University Press to publish The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (2002), a pioneering work that presents readers with a summary of research work in progress on all aspects of gardening in Australia.