A friend of mine grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn, where her Hungarian parents established themselves soon after the war. In that pre-multicultural era it did not occur to them to plant a Hungarian garden, which might have been, perhaps, an appealing jumble of marigolds and onions and sunflowers, trellised vines and apricot trees, of the kind that you see in Central European villages. Instead, apparently believing that there was no alternative to a One Australia policy, and being of a bookish disposition, they sensibly went out and bought a copy of Brunning’s Australian Gardener. This innocent purchase established them as the leading horticultural authority in their street. Faced with the hundreds of decisions that go into making and maintaining even a suburban garden, their neighbours wanted to know again and again, ‘What does the book say?’ What the book said, together with what the local Coles store happened to be offering at its garden counter, thus determined the horticultural face of Balwyn, and a great many other suburbs as well. 

That particular book must have been, I think, the 28th edition of the Australian Gardener. It appeared in 1946, still with the wartime foreword of the previous edition which promoted Home Gardening — always capitalised — as a patriotic duty. In war as in peace the rationale for gardening turned out to be much the same; it was useful to the community, and it promised cheaper living, better diets and a healthy dose of ‘mental uplift’ when the gardener triumphed over the appalling array of pests and diseases that Brunning’s listed at such depressing length. This book was clearly more than a technical manual. When it pronounced on the civic and moral and therapeutic value of gardening, it assumed an authority that was probably unrivalled in the literature of the Australian home. It was a text on domestic respectability, a gardener’s bible in every sense.