In re-generating John Glover’s Patterdale garden, a shameful colonial past is being re-sown with a reconciled future in mind,
Even before the meticulous private renovation of the homestead where colonial artist John Glover spent the last two decades of his life, Mills Plains had a pull. It was attractive to the painter who, arriving in Tasmania in 1831, chose this valley in the foothills of Ben Lomond to paint a distinctively Australian landscape with its twisted eucalypts, mystical light and unfenced plains. Glover was so productive in his output living here that contemporary artist Tom Roberts chose to describe the surrounding hills as “Glover Country”.
For a long time, those with an interest in early Australian history have paid homage to Glover, whose final resting place is a small graveyard in Deddington. Before him, shepherds, a carriage track and scattered stone huts – now mostly deconstructed by time into anonymous piles – had left their mark in the remote valley.
And, of course, significant Aboriginal presence: seasonal grounds traversed by the Ben Lomond nation over many years, fire-managing the landscape. “Man made such country home for at least 20,000 years. People civilised all the land, without fences, making farm and wilderness one,” wrote Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth.
If not for the most recent tenure of the Westmore family, Glover Country may well have been lost. Farmers Carol and the late Rodney Westmore took on the five-year restoration of Patterdale, Glover’s house, employing traditional crafts and skills to re-build and re-plaster stone walls, and to rebuild Glover’s studio with its large drystone chimney and shingles hand split from peppermint gum. The house opened to monthly tours in 2019, after which Carol’s eye extended to the restoration of the garden John Glover painted in 1835 in one of his most famous paintings, A View of the artist’s house and garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land.
While Carol Westmore has always been a keen amateur gardener, she did not underestimate the research needed to understand the garden task. In taking it on, she toured European gardens, including Hummelo, the private garden of Dutchman Piet Oudolf, leader of the new Perennial movement, and Sandycombe Lodge, the London house built by J.M.W. Turner in 1813. She returned from her travels and employed the garden design skills of British-born, Tasmania-based Catherine Shields, one of Australia’s leading professional garden designers.
Commissioned in early 2019, Shields recognised the quality of the building restoration and historical significance and did not take her responsibility lightly. “It’s a very special place,” she says. “The hills around are the original vegetation – vegetation that Glover would have seen – and that’s very special to me.”
Glover’s painting proved an obvious start for Shields, while Westmore had built some planting beds based on the original garden’s layout. Her research extended to plant lists known to have been brought to NSW early in the settlement of the colony; even poring over other paintings, one in particular by Glover of a North Hobart property, where Shields found a reference to painting roses written on the back of the painting.
“It is an English garden,” says Shields. “He was trying to recreate something with a little of the formality of an English garden. Roses were quite dominant so I researched what roses could have potentially been in Australia at that time.”
In deciding on an approach, Shields took inspiration from renowned British garden designer Dan Pearson, and his recreation of historic gardens in England including Chatsworth, Sissinghurst, Lambeth Palace and Lowther Castle.
“Dan realised he couldn’t recreate what had been grown several hundred years ago, so brought the planting up to date doing the best he could with the conditions and plants we have now. In the end I used the colours that Glover had used, but the plants that we can use now, and we know that grow. The climate has probably changed, the wildlife is different. There’s a hawthorn hedge now that wasn’t there, and an oak tree. The garden’s a different scale and we want it to look good all year round.”
Added to that, some of the plants grown in Glover’s time (like broom and yellow verbascusms) are declared weeds in Tasmania. Shields walked the hills and saw the impact of garden escapes in a fragile landscape. “It was important not to add to this problem.”
She decided that the garden needed to look painterly all year round. “Glover had painted one moment in the lifespan of a garden, from one aspect. Later in the year it would have looked different. We don’t know how much artistic license he was employing by painting nearly all of his plants flowering at the same time. He may have been painting what he wanted to see as much as what was there.”
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The new garden was planted in June 2019, in time for its first official viewing during Glover Prize week in March 2020. Catherine Shields returned to Glover’s painting and chose his main colour palette as the dominant theme. Fresh young greens, white flowers and yellow daffodils in spring; an old variety of pink rose (in their original locations), reds, yellows, white and a little purple in summer; and by autumn, the grasses with their soft yellows and straw, peppered with achilleas, and tall calamagrostis to emulate the vertical broom in the painting. In winter, the perennials die down, allowed to display their bronzes and golds, alongside the evergreens of rosemary, stachys and libertia.
Matrix planting allowed the garden to be seen from all angles at all times of the year, rather than from a single viewpoint like the painting. It is a garden designed to be walked through and experienced closely, where visitors brush up against plants, trailing their fingers and smelling the effect. Or else, viewed from an upstairs window, in the presence of a painterly eye.
Catherine Shields says the Westmores have enabled a community of people to come together around the house, people who care deeply about the legacy that has been privately restored.
“It feels like the whole thing is bigger than a house and a garden. Somehow it continues to draw people.”
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers - Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.
Hilary Burden was the inaugural artist/writer in residence at Patterdale in 2019.
Glover Country house and garden are open on the first Tuesday of every month, and during Glover Prize Week (in 2021, March 6 to 14). Visitors can also walk to seven sites where John Glover painted some of his paintings. For more information and contract details, see glovercountry.com.au.
