To the casual observer, old postcards of gardens might not seem immediately covetable. Inexpensive and mass-produced, they were designed to be dashed off without delay and dispatched without an envelope. It was never intended they should last forever.
But as it’s turned out some have lasted quite some time. Indeed many have a relevance that just keeps growing because, despite being so diminutive in size, postcards have a lot to tell. They provide a window into how we lived and gardened – not to mention communicated – more than a century ago.
Old postcards provide a window into how we lived and gardened a century ago.Credit:Ken Duxbury Collection
They show vistas across lawns and views down pathways. They home in on intricate parterres and flamboyant summer bedding. They illustrate rockeries and ferneries, fountains and rotundas, hedges and shrubberies, and all the other horticultural features that filled our public landscapes back when sending a postcard was as unremarkable as sending a text.
Thanks to all their pictorial revelations, postcards, which hit peak popularity from around 1900 to 1914, have wound their way into gardening exhibitions, talks, tours and history books. And now another particularly vast private collection has come to light.
When Ken Duxbury, a town planner and landscape architect with a lifelong interest in gardens and a serious bug for collecting, died at the age of 68 in March this year, among his possessions were more than 500 garden-related postcards.
The postcards chart our changing tastes in plants and garden design.Credit:Ken Duxbury Collection
Garden historian Helen Page says it is an “amazing and important collection” that sheds new light on the history of horticulture. While Duxbury had also amassed tubs of nursery catalogues, hundreds of gardening magazines, up to 1500 recipe books and booklets, more than 1000 works of Australian pulp fiction, and 1500-odd non-gardening-related postcards, Page considers the gardening postcards “the best bit”.
A rockery in the Darling Gardens in Clifton Hill, demolished about 70 years ago.Credit:Ken Duxbury Collection
Page and Duxbury bonded in the early 1990s over their shared interest in garden history and, while she had visited his place a couple of times over the years and knew he was a committed collector, she says she had “no idea” about the full extent of his postcard acquiring.
Originally published at Melbourne News Vine
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