Review: The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style, by Richard Aitken

Abstract

Richard Aitken The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style Melbourne: Miegunyah Press and the State Library of Victoria, 2010, xi + 244 pp., AU$64.99, ISBN 9780522857504 Architect Richard Aitken, author of The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style , is well known to landscape architects and garden historians. As coeditor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (2002), author of several books, from Gardenesque (2004) to Seeds of Change (2006), and founder of the journal Australian Garden History , Aitken has done much to put Australian garden history on the map. His recent book continues that important work. In The Garden of Ideas , Aitken’s intention is “to open a conversation, one that results in a more profound understanding of our culture of garden-making, and one that leads to enhanced appreciation both of exceptional and representative examples of Australian garden-making” (xi). The book admirably accomplishes this in its survey of Australia’s ever-changing and complex garden styles. While there have been many fine studies on Australian garden history, until Aitken’s book, none has attempted such an ambitious overview from the eighteenth century to the present.1 None …