A Garden of Delights

Sara Hardy, The Unusual Life of Edna Walling. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005.

Reviewed by Sylvia Martin

Actor, playwright and now biographer, Sara Hardy, has surely a unique reason for wanting to write about her subject. She once played the role of Edna Walling (1895-1973) - the ‘girl gardener’ who became one of Australia’s first and most enduring landscape designers - in a play called Edna for the Garden, by Suazanne Spunner, produced in Melbourne in 1989. Hardy says she enjoyed being Edna Walling: she liked ‘her strength, her warmth, her vision’. She also connected with her subject’s background as a Devonian as well as being ‘fascinated by the faint suggestion that Edna was a lesbian’. She was intrigued by the fact that, although the landscape designer’s public persona and her achievements were well-known, the woman herself remained elusive.

Acknowledging the excellent books published in recent years about Walling’s garden designs by Peter Watts, Trisha Dixon and Jennie Churchill, Hardy states that, her own different purpose is ‘to explore the woman behind the work’. This she does. With skill and highly imaginative writing, she takes us into the world of this independent, unconventional and creative woman. Hardy’s approach to biography is also fresh, creative and unconventional.

Edna Walling’s vision created magic places out of Australian gardens from the 1920s- on. After graduating from Burnley Horticultural College in Melbourne she started designing grounds for clients whose needs ranged from suburban plots to the expansive gardens of the rich and famous, including work for Dame Nellie Melba. Sometimes the task required great ingenuity as in the case of the work she did for Keith Murdoch on the country property near Frankston that he bought as a wedding present for his wife Elisabeth in 1928. The old homestead was given a complete makeover and, to Edna’s horror, was reborn as a Louisiana-style plantation mansion complete with portico and gleaming white columns. Part of her ingenious landscaping to marry this edifice with the Australian countryside was to plant a winding avenue of pale-trunked lemon scented gums that ‘prepared the eye for the straight white columns of the façade’.

The mention of Edna Walling’s extraordinarily apt name conjures up images of stone steps and low stone walls, integral features of the secret and harmonious spaces she created in her garden designs. Her love affair with stone began when she built her first stone cottage on land at Mooroolbark near the foot of the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne in the early 1920s. The young woman carried out her physically-demanding work in comfortable jodhpurs, which led to the curious local residents dubbing her ‘Trousers’. This first incarnation of Sonning, named after a village on the Thames remembered from her childhood, was the beginning of her vision of an integrated village/suburb where houses and landscape would blend harmoniously and people could live in a combination of privacy and community – to be called Bickleigh Vale. It was not the only visionary attempt to create beauty out of the burgeoning suburban sprawl of the 1920s and ’30s; Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin held similar aspirations with their Sydney experiment, Castlecrag, at around the same time.

Edna Walling was what we would call today multi-skilled. She created unique garden designs that blended native and exotic plants; she also designed and built country cottages for ‘Billy Vale’. In addition to these skills, she was a fine artist who painted beautiful watercolour garden plans, a photographer, a journalist and the writer of books such as Gardens in Australia, A Gardener’s Log, and The Australian Roadside.

Walling’s style in her gardening columns in The Garden and the Home, Home Beautiful, and Woman’s World was relaxed and chatty. There are many examples of her writing in this book and Hardy herself has channelled Walling’s style perfectly in her own writing. Commentary segues into quotation with seamless ease.

The author also uses her literary skills to draw us into the immediacy of Edna Walling’s world: at one point we are taken on a tour of a Walling garden as if we were potential clients. In the chapter entitled ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ we are treated to a series of witty snapshots written in the present tense: we share the young woman’s liberating experience of having her long red hair cut into the short crop that reflected a ‘boyish face’ in the mirror; we attend a meeting of the Women Horticulturalists’ Association of Victoria with her; we go to a garden party attended by musicians, architects and artists, and potters such as Merric Boyd, father of Arthur. In describing events like Open Day at Sonning, where a ballet was performed in the open-air theatre and funds were raised for the Red Cross, Hardy always includes the garden as part of the scene: ‘wide sweeps of grassy lawn running away into clumps of native and exotic trees, with drifts of pale mauve irises at their base, the whole backed by a young forest of slender gums’.

One important area of Edna Walling’s life remains elusive and that concerns her sexuality. Her androgynous “look”, her friendships with women and her lack of romantic liaisons with men all point to the conclusion that she was a lesbian. Apparently just one letter survives that indicates an intense passion and longing for another woman, but her (unrequited?) relationship with Esmé Johnston resolved itself into a friendship that continued intermittently for the rest of her life. For the rest, Edna gave nothing away. Her single life was always complemented by rich friendships with women. Successions of “helpers” lived close by her at Mooroolbark, from Blanche Scharp to Joan ‘Twid’ Niewand, who also helped Edna build her coastal retreat at East Point. These women managed her accounts, even acted as housekeepers and cooked for her, but seemed to remain employees and friends. If any were her lovers too, she did not speak of it. She also employed men such as Eric Hammond and another aptly-named stone worker called Ellis Stones, who became friends too. She had a close but probably platonic friendship with another woman who settled at Bickleigh Vale, Lorna Fielden. Otherwise, she expended her affections on her animals: her sturdy horse Adam and a series of much-loved dogs and cats.

Sara Hardy subtly explores her subject’s sexual predilection in a chapter called ‘Love’, contextualising it historically since the 1920s was still very much a period when lesbianism was the ‘the Love that dared not speak its name’. She also suggests that this was a time when ‘many women who would now be called lesbians didn’t recognise their intensity as sexual desire’. Edna Walling was a public figure working for often conservative clients. They accepted her mannish look and preference for trousers as part of her “hands on” profession, but would they have employed her if she had been open about an unsanctioned sexuality too?

The trouble is that the biographical genre has underlying conventions that create expectations, not always consciously, on the part of the reader. It is still acceptable for biographies of male public figures like statesmen or scientists to concentrate solely on their careers, but the life trajectory for women, even those who follow important careers, assumes love, marriage and children to be a part of it. Independent single women like Edna Walling disrupt this expectation and, although the author in this case has explored her subject’s passionate life as sensitively and compassionately as she is able, reviewers of the book have still criticised Walling on the basis of heterosexist assumptions. The reviewer in the Age concluded that her emotional range was ‘schoolgirlish’, while the reviewer in the Australian Book Review asserted that ‘Hardy suggests that Walling was a lonely woman whose main passion was poured into her work’. This is actually far from the truth. Hardy does suggest that at times Edna wished for a partner to help her in life’s decision-making and envied a little the companionship she saw in one long-term female couple among her friends. But she also stresses her subject’s independence, which was probably too important to her to risk compromising it, and quotes this extract from a letter to her niece:

Often I wish I were in double harness & pulling with someone [-] & then the inner voice says ‘you’d be grateful you’re not living with the wrong person – that’d drive you mad!’

Towards the end of her life, Edna Walling made a long-planned move to Buderim in Queensland, seduced by the beauty of the area. By this time she had shifted in the direction of advocating native plants rather than water-hungry exotics and had also written about the importance of retaining roadside trees, decrying the increasing destruction of these wildlife corridors. With her move to Buderim she really became ‘a conservation warrior’, writing to newspapers, councils and politicians, not simply to complain about the destruction of the natural landscape but to suggest alternatives. A fellow conservationist was Queensland wildflower artist, Kathleen Macarthur, whose life story has been recently written by Margaret Somerville in her biography, Wildflowering (UQP, 2004). That the two women were acquainted is clear by the inclusion of a photographic portrait of Macarthur in Wildflowering taken by Edna Walling. With these two recent books about women whose lives were intimately bound up with their love of the Australian landscape and its flora, Hardy and Somerville, in their different but equally fresh approaches to biography, are also quietly extending the limits of the genre.

One minor quibble about The Unusual Life of Edna Walling, which is an elegantly-designed and illustrated paperback, is the lack of signposts indicating endnotes. Even the most assiduous reader does not turn constantly to the end of the book in case there is an interesting note there and so mostly they are missed. One hopes fervently that this is not a coming editorial direction for Allen and Unwin undermining the scholarly reader’s pleasure and profit. Does a little number at the end of an occasional sentence seriously disrupt readers’ enjoyment of the free-flowing narrative?

Sylvia Martin is the author of Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin. Her biography of Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian from 1932-1946, is forthcoming from Allen and Unwin.