Edna Walling And Her Gardens
Horticulture Biography Landscape Architecture Vintage Reference Environmental Design Australian Gardens Garden History
Edna Walling And Her Gardens is the only illustrated biography that traces the life and design philosophy of Australia’s most influential landscape architect. In 136 crisp pages, Peter Watts follows Walling from her 1920s arrival in Victoria through the creation of the famous “Bickleigh Vale” village and the hundreds of gardens she drafted for rural homesteads and Melbourne suburbs. The 1997 second-edition hardback reproduces over 100 of Walling’s original plans, soft pastel perspectives and black-and-white photographs—many taken by Walling herself—showing how she turned native gums, stonework and meandering paths into the relaxed “Australian” style now copied from the Dandenongs to the Adelaide Hills.
Collectors value the book because it is the last edition printed on heavy art-stock before the title went out of print and digital reproductions replaced the duotone plates. The large-format dust-jacketed volume is still the go-to reference for heritage gardeners, landscape-architecture students and owners of Walling-era homes who need to restore drystone walls, thyme lawns or the trademark silver-leaved colour palette she loved. Watts supplements the visuals with diary excerpts and client letters that reveal Walling’s mantra: “a garden must look as if it has always belonged to the soil,” a principle now enshrined in Australian landscape courses.
This copy is a clean, tight vintage hardcover from a smoke-free home—no inscriptions, no ex-library marks, just light shelf-rub to the jacket. For anyone hunting a giftable, durable copy of the definitive Walling monograph, the 1997 second edition is the sweet-spot: recent enough to have fresh research, old enough to carry the premium matte paper and stitched binding that modern reprints no longer offer.
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