Feature articles
Camperdown then and now Janet O’Hehir, Secretary, Camperdown Botanic Gardens and Arboretum Trust Inc
People often ask me why our botanic gardens and arboretum is so far from the centre of town. I tell them to look around. The botanic garden sits at the highest point of the 25-hectare site, between the two crater lakes of Bullen-Merri and Gnotuk. To the north and west you can look out across the western Victorian volcanic plain with its scoria cones and shallow saline lakes. In country Victoria in the 1800s a local council would look around for a site where they could set up a public garden. In Camperdown, it was the other way around; the place so impressed Government Surveyor Robert Scott that he recommended it be preserved as a park for the benefit of the public. In fact, he stayed and built his own home down the road. The conversion of this special place into something the British and particularly Scottish
Late afternoon view west to Lake Gnotuk. Credit: Janet O’Hehir
settlers would recognise as a public park began in the 1870s. Daniel Bunce, the curator at Geelong’s Botanic Gardens, did the initial layout. William Guilfoyle, director of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens provided advice from the 1880s through to 1910 when he prepared a detailed plan with a list of dozens of trees. With 113 years of hindsight we might not agree with his choice of ‘hardy shrubs such as Coprosmas, Laurustinus, Privet, Hawthorns and English, Spanish and white brooms’, or the Pampas and Arundo to be planted ‘every 50 feet or so’ around the garden fence. We have substituted some different plants, which we hope will capture his intent.
THE BOTANIC GARDENer | ISS 61 Summer 2023
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