How does your garden grow?

The Kitchen Garden.

In the vegetable garden in Newmarket, c 1900.

Pugh’s Almanac was the search engine of the emerging colony of Queensland. One could turn to Pugh’s to settle a dinner-table dispute as to the exact date of Emperor Maximilian’s shooting (19 June 1867), find the best navigation route for Bustard’s Bay, and locate an official stamp vendor in North Brisbane.

And then there was the Gardening Calendar, compiled exclusively by Walter Hill, the Director of the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. Hill began his work in Brisbane in 1855, applying his horticultural knowledge to a subtropical climate, and quickly becoming the best authority on acclimatisation and growing conditions.

Walter Hill, Director of the Brisbane Botanical Gardens.

Hill’s authoritative planting instructions took the various climate zones of the colony into account, and helped generations of new chums to become self-sufficient with his kitchen garden calendar. He also gave advice on flower gardens, fruit gardens and fields (some of his descriptions of flower garden varieties are exultant, and will be part of another gardening post).

Here are some early Queenslanders, and their productive home gardens, accompanied by extracts from Hill’s Calendar for Kitchen Gardens.