Gardens of the Goldfields

In 1857, only a few short years after the gold rush commenced, the miners at Ballarat and Bendigo and the townspeople at Malmsbury dreamt of shady trees, green lawns, lakes and ducks, flowers beds and bandstands, and 150 years later their dreams survive, like mirages. The beautiful gardens of the Goldfields embody some of the most interesting strands of nineteenth century thinking and development. There are grand ideas to meditate upon as you sip on a glass of central Victorian wine in the shade of a 150-year-old tree.
 

Gold
The world’s richest goldfields underwrote the development of the Goldfields gardens. The gardens at White Hills (Bendigo) and Castlemaine were built on land that had been heavily mined.

Egalitarian democracy
Unlike the famous English gardens that graced the country estates of the aristocracy,the Goldfields gardens were always intended to be enjoyed by everyone for free.

The Age of Enlightenment
The Goldfields gardens were not just for enjoyment, they were intended to educate, and to help spread new species. This was embodied in the beliefs of Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, who supplied the Goldfields gardens with cuttings and seedlings.

Landscape Gardening
The Landscape style developed in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries melded the work of man and nature. The most famous exponent was Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, who laid the foundation for the gardens of Chatsworth House, England. The gardens were later completed by Joseph Paxton. One of Paxton's apprentices, Philip Doran, became the curator of the Castlemaine Botanic Gardens for 47 years. There was another famous garden around Lowther Castle in England. Capability Brown had already had a hand in it, and Wordsworth featured it in several poems. George Longley, trained as a horticulturalist at Lowther, and was the curator at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens for 40 years.