Scotsburn Nurseries: Celebrating 90 years

By Peter Douglas

Scotsburn Nurseries was established in 1930. These days it’s run by Peter Douglas and Mark Heaton, supplying Melbourne and Victoria’s best independent retail nurseries. But there’s a whole lot of history and stories in the preceding 90 years.

Managing Director, Peter Douglas takes you on a journey through time; to meet the incredible characters that came before him and reveal the twists and turns the business has taken. For Peter it’s been a fascinating process to uncover the origins of Scotsburn Nurseries and in particular the lives of Fred Linton, the founder in 1930 and his grandfather Dave Wood, who purchased the business in August 1945. A big thank you to Peter for sharing his findings in Groundswell.

The origins of Scotsburn

The Melbourne Hunt Club was founded by Mr George Watson in 1852. Watson had only arrived in Australia from Ireland in 1850 and he is famous in racing circles as a rider and administrator. He was Master of Hounds at the Hunt Club until his death in 1906, a steward at the inaugural races at Caulfield in 1859 and starter of the first Melbourne Cup in 1861.

From 1887-1929 the Melbourne Hunt Club’s well-heeled members chased foxes and sometimes kangaroos over sandy, scrubby country full of “swampy depressions” covering East Oakleigh and running north as far as Box Hill. “The swampy parts had dense tea tree and the open parts were bracken covered”. According to family lore, The Hunt Club called this the Scotsburn Estate.

The term “burn” comes from the North of England and Scotland meaning stream or more generally fresh water and can be seen in many names like Blackburn and Melbourne. The township of Scotsburn just out of Ballarat was originally Scots Marsh, named for the local landholders and later changed to the more attractive Scotsburn. The Melbourne Hunt Club’s estate is likely to have been named after Scotsburn, a marshy area of Ross-shire in the Scottish Highlands.

Melbourne went through a rapid expansion phase through the 1920’s and the best of the Hunt Club’s land began to be taken up for grazing and market gardening. The Club was finally forced to move to Cranbourne in 1929.

Top: Fred Linton, 1933

Bottom: David Wood

David, Glenda and Robert Wood

The Scotsburn Estate was divided up leading to the establishment of the suburb Huntingdale and three famous sand belt golf clubs: Huntingdale, Commonwealth and Metropolitan.

The Linton Family.

Henry (Harry) Linton and his wife Adeline raised a family of five boys and one daughter in Elsternwick. Harry was a maintenance man and builder for the Education Department and grew flower and vegetable seedlings on the side. He and his boys sold their produce door to door to their neighbours. Presumably through the process of the Melbourne Hunt Club moving Harry purchased a block of land in Centre Road Clayton in 1929 and started his own nursery.

Harry’s third son Ern took on his father’s business on returning from WWI service and with his children Ernie and Lettie, Ern A.B. Linton ran it until sometime in the 1980’s. Ernie started Speciality Trees in 1977 to supply advanced Eucalypts to the Knox City shopping centre. Harry and Adeline’s second son, Bill, established a wholesale nursery and flower business in Frankston. Over time Bill’s business W.J. Linton and Sons grew potatoes, Ericas and Proteas before Michael Linton crossed into retailing and established ‘Linton’s Garden and Home’ on the Nepean Highway at Mt Eliza. The youngest sons Les and Stan started their own nursery business that branched into Nobelius Nursery, Din San Nursery and Warren Park Nursery. Harry and Adeline’s eldest son, Frederick Henry Burkinshaw (Fred) was born in January 1908. We don’t know a great deal about his early life other than he left formal schooling aged 14 or 15 and that he worked with his father, growing and selling plants. Aged 22, 1930 was a big year for Fred. He married Elma Elizabeth Mullens and purchased a block of land around the corner from his father’s Centre Road nursery in Scotsburn Avenue. With some of his brothers he established his own nursery business, Fred Linton Nurseryman. In early 1932 Fred and Elma “set up home in Scotsburn Avenue”. It’s fair to assume that Fred built the small weatherboard house himself. Fred and Elma had three daughters followed by a son, Young Freddy born in 1941. Jennifer (Jenny) was born in 1950 after the tragic loss of Freddie.

Fred’s business was mixed as many were at the time. Production was in ground, making the most of the fine sandy soil. The soil was not especially fertile but it was easy to work and drained easily after rain. As well as the famous golf courses, the area was littered with pits where the sand was extracted for building, landscaping and industry.

Plant selection is somewhat mysterious. On one photo, Fred noted, “Our nursery where we grew 200 tobacco plants in 1933”. Wood family tradition holds that Fred grew cut flowers and supplied them to various suburban florists and nurseries and at some point, he started selling at The Queen Victoria Market. As evidenced by the production of tobacco plants, Fred and his brothers would have a go a pretty much anything they could grow and sell. Cut flowers grown included delphinium, russell lupins, aquilegia, ranunculus, anemone, statice, stocks, polyanthus, violets, sweet william and more. The favourites were poppies and gum. The poppies were cut with long stems, the cut ends singed with flame to help them last and then they were bunched with coppery gum tips collected from the local scrub. Herbaceous perennials were especially valuable as the flowers would be sold in Spring and Summer and the crowns lifted in the Winter and sold at the market wrapped in newspaper.

Any business of the 1930’s cannot be considered without factoring in the Great Depression. It’s notable that in the worst period of the Depression, 1930-32, Fred’s small business supported his growing family and a small team at the nursery. Australia’s unemployment rate was recorded as high as 32% in the early 1930’s and the loss of jobs was most severe in Sydney and Melbourne. In his book, “The Myth of the Great Depression”, David Potts (Scribe 2006) argues that by the beginning of World War II Australian’s were actually healthier and hardier than they had been in the 1920’s. One of the key drivers of the improved health of the Australian community was the social response to the economic crash, “Very important was the introduction of the food dole. It was food coupons, so drunken men couldn’t just drink it in a rush at the pubs and so on, gamble it away or smoke too many cigarettes. There was a constant supply of food to the families, and people began to eat better in different ways, especially food from home gardens and from relatives sending food down from the country…”. According to Potts, the worst years of the Depression saw an increase in market vegetable consumption “up 46 per cent –they were very cheap”. That increase was driven by homeowners converting their quarter acres to vegetable production and via produce sales through the markets. The primary wholesale market in Melbourne was the Queen Victoria Market.

Our nursery where we grew 200 tobacoo plants in 1933

The ‘Vic Market’ holds a special place in the development of the nursery industry in Victoria. A wholesale produce market has operated on the current site at the top of Elizabeth Street from 1867. Construction of sheds A-F in the “Upper Market” site commenced in 1877 and by the 1920’s shed E was the home of plant sales. Garden plants were sold at other metropolitan markets including Prahran, Dandenong and South Melbourne, but a stand at the Peel Street end of E Shed at the “Vic” was the most sought after. According to the Generations of Growth – a history of the Nursery Industry Association of Victoria, “While the competition was often willing, it should also be noted that this industry was, and still is, comprised of people who would go out of their way to help another in trouble.”

Trade at the Vic Market in the 1930’s and 40’s was wholesale 5.00am-8.00am; Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday. Retail trade was allowed from 8.30am-1.30pm. Retail trade was added from 8.00am on Fridays in the early 1950’s. Over time increasing space constraints and the development of retail sales led to the development of the Footscray Wholesale Markets that were opened in 1969 and operated until moving to Epping in 2015. The move to Footscray led directly to the Nurserymen’s Association (NGIV) establishing Trade Day at Caribbean Gardens.

Fred would load the truck for Market on the afternoon prior. In Spring that was often the evening prior and the loading was completed using hurricane lamps. Three mornings a week he would head off at 4.00am, and regularly would be in bed by 8.00pm. On his way home from market Fred would drop off deliveries at selected customers. At Vickerman’s Florist, Balaclava, Fred met and befriended 16 or 17-year-old David Wood.

Wood family

Uncle Dave (David Wood)

David Oswald Wood was born in July 1915. He was the 10th son of Frederick George Wood’s twelve children. Frederick George arrived in Australia with his family as a 16-year-old in 1886 and was a nurseryman his entire life, working for Nobelius in the Dandenongs, the Orangeries in NSW and John Riddoch opening the Coonawarra district in South Australia. FG Wood is recorded as maker of the first Coonawarra vintage in the Autumn of 1894, he also ran his own nursery in Deepdene for a period. David, like a number of his brothers followed his father into the nursery trade.

Life was pretty tough as the youngest boy in a nurseryman’s family in the 1920’s, you had to learn to stand up for yourself. This became even more critical when David’s mother Elizabeth died in 1925. Frederick’s life disintegrated, helped no doubt by his love of the punt. David remained quite bitter about his upbringing and it shaped his attitudes to money and responsibility. Frederick’s eldest grandson Fred of FG Wood Nurseryman (Dave’s nephew) had a quite different appreciation of his Grandfather as old Frederick kick started Fred’s nursery business with a loan after a big win at the races.

Young David was no scholar, but he was athletic. He attended Oakleigh State School and spent two years at Caulfield Technical School where he won the under 15 School Athletics Championship in 1915. He also received a valour award after saving one of his brothers from drowning, although this caused him trouble as the boys should have been in school at the time of the incident. After his mother’s death his older siblings moved away, and his younger sisters went to live with relatives. Dave had to fend for himself. During his years at Caulfield Tech he supported himself with a paper round and boarded with a Mr & Mrs Evans. At the end of the 1930 school year, aged 15 David Wood got a job as “Florist’s Boy” at W.T. Vickerman Florist of Balaclava. The Florist’s Boy’s primary work was deliveries by bicycle and David long remembered delivering floral baskets to passengers leaving Port Melbourne. It’s fair to say the tips he picked up left a lasting impression. Fred Linton got to know young Dave at Vickerman’s and offered him a job as his Market Man, as soon as Dave could get his driver’s licence.

Dave flourished at the Vic Market. He was industrious and had rogue’s charm. While he was never one for the written word his basic arithmetic was second to none. In 1935 he met Emma Glenda (Glen) Causon at the Four Fours social club in Oakleigh, they married in January 1937 and built their own home in Hatter Street, Oakleigh. A son, David Robert (Robert) arrived in 1938 and a daughter, Janet (Jan) in 1943. Everyone had a nickname, to Glenda, David was Woodie. Later David became generally known as Uncle Dave in the nursery industry, quite simply because he was Fred’s uncle despite being only a few years older, and perhaps because both Fred and Dave were larger than life.

When war was declared in 1939, compulsory military service in the Citizen’s Military Force (CMF) was introduced for all men aged 18-35. Fred was 31 and Dave only 24 and they both had young families so neither were in a hurry to join the AIF. As Fred’s business produced vegetable plants deemed essential to the War effort, they were both exempt from compulsory service although they were not exempt from the social expectation that young men should volunteer. David served as an Air Raid Warden. Business during the war was solid. Food rationing was introduced so many households expanded their veggie patches and there were enormous contracts for vegetable seedlings for commercial production. The NGIV’s “Generations of Growth” history reprints an order to Bone’s Nursery from SPC in 1942 for 750,000 Tatura Dwarf Globe tomato plants at 25/- per 1000 sound seedlings. Boomaroo Nursery probably handles orders of this size today, but modern-day Scotsburn Nurseries’ biggest single commercial order is well under 100,000 plants annually.

Scotsburn Nurseries

Fred Linton and David Wood share a number of traits and sensibilities. They were of similar backgrounds and education, both kept beautiful home gardens and as older men they shared a passion for lawn bowls. Fred’s career indicates that he was a plants man who took great pleasure from propagating and growing plants, he also had a strong community service ethic serving as a City of Oakleigh councillor and Mayor and giving many years service to the Masons and the South Oakleigh Bowling Club. David was more driven to succeed, perhaps that was innate or perhaps it was due to his upbringing. He worked hard and by all accounts played hard and while he was proud of the industry that he worked in; he was never regarded highly as a “grower”. Over the years he relied heavily on his nephew Fred, his son Robert, and later Nursery Manager Rod Dawson for growing expertise. What he did have was a passion to get ahead, a strong work ethic and an instinctive business acumen, which included a shrewd judgement of people and an abhorrence of debt. By 1945, Dave aged 30 was looking for greener pastures. He applied for the position of Garden Department Manager at the GJ Coles store No. 6, Swanston Street, Melbourne, but was unsuccessful.

When David started looking for his own block of land to start his own business it appears Fred saw an opportunity. Fred offered to sell his business lock, stock, and barrel to David, including the house at 97 Scotsburn Avenue for £3500.00. In August 1945, the business changed hands. David and his family moved (much to Glenda’s disappointment) to Scotsburn Avenue and Fred’s family rented the Wood family’s Hatter Street home until their new home on North Road Oakleigh was built on the proceeds of the sale of the nursery. David changed the business name to Scotsburn Nurseries.

Fred Linton quickly started a new business, Golf Links Nursery at the back of his North Road property near the corner of Golf Links Road. This business focussed on propagation of general lines especially hibiscus, the majority sold to his brothers. He ran Golf Links Nursery until retiring in 1967. Fred was a generous and enthusiastic horticulturist, always happy to share his knowledge, a fact fondly remembered by the young Dutch immigrant who lived over the back fence of Golf Links Nursery. John Van der Horst started working for Fred after school, he now runs one of Australia’s premier retail nurseries and has served as NGIV president.

Dave in his prime

Dave Wood grew his first large tomato contract in the Spring of 1945. Not long after it was planted out in Shepparton the entire crop was destroyed by floods and Dave received a second contract to replace the lost plants. This was a story he told with a broad smile until the end of his life. It is a story that epitomises his career. He was extremely lucky to take on the business as Australia entered the boom growth period that followed World War II, but he had the skill and ability to make the most of that good fortune. In his son Robert’s words “he didn’t gamble on long shots – only proven winners”. Fred (nephew Fred Wood) may have been out in front but Fred also incurred the costs involved in the trialling and innovation. DOW was only prepared to come along with the new ideas only when they were proven to be successful.” By the time he retired in the early 1970’s, Scotsburn Nurseries was the biggest bedding plant grower in Victoria. Of course, once he retired Scotsburn was quickly overtaken by businesses run by a new generation of industry leaders. But that’s a whole other story.

Special thanks to Jenny Hill for photos and information on her dad, Fred Linton and to Robert Wood and Jan Douglas for their reminiscences and written memoirs.