“Group of women having a tea party in Queensland, Australia,” ca. 1887, photographer unknown, via State Library of Queensland.
Beautiful Platycerium or staghorn ferns on the wall and columns. These could be Platycerium superbum, which are native to Australia. The one on the left seems to be supporting another plant — maybe a coleus.
How quiet it is, how silent,
like an afternoon in Pompeii.— Louise Glück, from “A Summer Garden“
“Reading the paper in a Gympie[, Queensland,] garden,” ca. 1871, by Edward H. Forster, via State Library of Queensland Commons on flickr.
Edward Forster was a professional photographer who worked in and around Gympie, a gold-mining town in eastern Australia, during the 1870s. Many of his photos feature local families in front of their cottages.
‘Gympie’ is an aboriginal term for Dendrocnide moroides, a stinging shrub in the area.
I recently came across these photos of an Australian vernacular garden structure: the bush-house.
Bush-houses (also called shade-houses or ferneries) were built to protect tropical plants from the sun. By the late 1800s, many Australian gardeners were as enthusiastic about amassing and displaying these plants as Victorian hothouse collectors in Great Britain and North America.
The bush-house was modeled on the English glassed-in greenhouse or conservatory, but built with less costly, local materials.
In a 2003 article for Queensland Review, “Tropicalia: Gardens with Tropical Attitude,” Jeannie Sim wrote that, by the end of the 19th century, a number of international exhibitions in Australia were showing off “high-quality examples of tropicalian gardening” in bush-houses.
“The most extraordinary of these kinds of structures,” she wrote, “[was] arguably the one built in 1897 for the Queensland Colonial and Indian Exhibition in Brisbane. . . . Covering the walls and pillars of the bush-house were more than 3000 staghorn, bird’s nest and elkhorn ferns collected from the Blackall Range . . . . The exhibition guide [noted that] . . . Queenslanders ‘could gain a more vivid idea than ever before of the unequalled luxuriance of their scrubs.’ These horticultural displays marked both local pride and individuality, and promoted the use of native plants and bush-houses in gardens.”
According to Sim, many of the plants cared for and protected in the bush-houses were also displayed in popular verandah gardening. “The verandah was the public showcase for the gardener’s bush-house skills.”
Judging from these photos, bush-houses seem to have been frequently constructed of panels of wood or bamboo lath set at decorative angles.
It also appears that many bush- or shade-houses were used as cool(er) places to entertain and relax.
All of these photos are via the Commons Flickr photostream of the State Library of Queensland, Australia.
To scroll through larger versions of the pictures, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any of the thumbnails in the gallery.
Continue reading “Vintage landscape: bush-houses in Australia”
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