History These articles about Ellis Stones are the first in a planned series of Historical Articles. If you would like to submit an article for inclusion, you can do so: HERE Ellis Stones Ellis Stones: Landscape Architect Drawings by Ellis Stones. RoPPA Submission to Heritage Victoria.

Drawing by Ellis Stones

Ellis Stones

From Anne Latreille, The Natural Garden: Ellis Stones: His Life and Work, Viking O’Neil, Penguin Books, 1990, chapter 18 ‘Elliston – the importance of landscaping’

THE advertisements for Merchant Builders' most ambitious project, a large housing estate on the site of the old Rosanna Golf Links, promoted both an achievement and a new way of living. 'At Elliston, trees are built around, and birds still sing. Underground wiring and fifty acres of natural parkland provide a perfect setting for Merchant Builders houses . . .' they read. 'Visit unorthodox Elliston.' 'Magnificent Elliston - nationally acclaimed as a superb example of natural planning '.

The forty hectares of land had been a farm originally, then a golf course. Subsequent subdivision plans by its owners had caused heated local protest, but a compromise was reached whereby Heidelberg City Council agreed to buy the golf course, selling half for housing development to pay for the retention of the other half as a park. Merchant Builders was the successful tenderer. They asked four architects - Graeme Gunn, Charles Duncan, and the firms of Jackson and Walker, and McGlashan and Everist - to come up with fifty related but different basic house designs available to people who bought land on the standard subdivision. The open-ended form of this was already set, and its combination of loops and culs-de-sac giving onto the park was most attractive to Merchant Builders.

Ellis Stones was in charge of site planning, of the landscape around the houses and - in a separate commission from the local council - of the adjoining Rosanna Parklands, through which ran Salt Creek. This was to link the two elements, housing and landscape, on a scale not attempted before, creating what was described as a garden suburb of character and harmony. At the opening ceremony in July 1969 the Minister for Local Government, 'Dick' (later Sir Rupert) Hamer, said Elliston was 'a glimpse of homes of the future, which won't have a view of bitumen and power lines'.

Some 250 houses were planned at a base cost of between $23,000 and $3 1,000. In the event about seventy were built before Merchant Builders made land available to other developers so that the original concept lapsed - for buyers, this had included contractual conditions such as land­scaping by Ellis Stones to each house, and safeguards against out-of-scale development (two-storey additions and the like). It is a pity the response from the buying public was not better, because the whole idea was ahead of its time.

In Melbourne an earlier scheme had met a much harsher fate. In 1966 the Lend Lease Corporation engaged Robin Boyd's firm, Romberg and Boyd, to design some 400 houses at a new development in Glen Waverley called Appletree Hill. Australian Home Beautiful noted that this was to be 'a garden suburb where the gardens grow into one another rather than standing out in stiff and formal array as competitive monuments to the industry of their owners', where front fences would be abolished, native trees and shrubs planted and existing trees retained, while wiring from street poles to houses would be put underground. Appletree Hill did not last long. While 10,000 visitors trooped through the first display houses over a two-month period, only six orders eventuated and Lend Lease aborted the project.

It was Graeme Gunn who suggested that Elliston be named after Ellis. On the way to a job one day, David Yencken asked Ellis how he would feel about this. `You're joking", he said. We drove along for a while. Then he said: "Are you really serious?" "Yes, quite serious." "That's wonderful, bloody wonderful." 'Thereafter he threw himself into the project with even more than his normal enthusiasm, working there at weekends, calling in to plant trees and creepers and to talk to the residents. But he never lost sight of the overall significance, writing in 1971:

They were kind enough to call Elliston after me. I like to think that this

was not merely a tribute to a person, but a recognition of the role of

landscaping, firstly, as the total unifying element in the park and

throughout the development, and secondly, as a vital aspect of a

personal environment . . . I hope that this is a sign of the beginning of a

new appreciation for landscape.

Ellis knew what he wanted to achieve in design terms. Even though constrained by the subdivided format, he wanted the gardens, streets and park to flow into and through each other, with the pervading influence being the feeling of the old landscape - Eucalyptus maculata and E. botryoides and the old pines planted by the early settlers. Luckily, all the streets except one had almost direct access to the park, and the first group of houses was designed to give onto a common 'ride' of shared land at the rear that also led down to the park. Where two houses were being built at the same time, fence lines were able to be juggled so that a 'dead' space beside one house was taken in by the neighbour, and vice-versa. Side fences were planted in depth with the types of shrubs and trees also used in the park, so that they would 'virtually disappear . . . with no sense of visual interruption at the fence line'. Low log fences separated gardens looking onto the park from the park itself.

Knowing what he wanted was one thing - 'the landscape must be strong and simple, with one continuous flowing feeling'. But getting there was another. By now Ellis was seventy-four years sold and although he was to work for other developers (like A. V. Jennings and Stocks and Holdings) this was the first time he had encountered anything on this scale.

Co-ordinating the development was Robin Edmond, a young architect newly returned from England, where he had been involved in similar projects. It soon became apparent to him that Ellis was a little out of his depth. 'It wasn't that he couldn't do it - he had a wonderful touch, absolutely fantastic - but that he had never worked the way we now needed to work. 1 would say "Ellis, we need a grading plan" and he would reply 'I don't work like that - 1 just tell the bulldozer driver what to do". He realised quickly that he had come to the limits of his technical ability.'

Robin Edmond (who is now a landscape architect doing large-scale work in Australia and Hong Kong) had long sessions with Ellis, so that he fully understood what Ellis wanted, and so that Ellis would trust him not to muddy the design themes. Chief among these was the use of only a few elements, and of simple materials. Edmond prepared drawings, discussing them with Ellis either on site or - when Ellis was suffering one of his bouts of illness - at Locksley Road. He developed short-cuts; a way of drawing rocks so that the contractor (John Jackson) would know how to place them without Ellis's supervision, and a way of identifying different types and shapes of rock so that they could be ordered easily. (This involved visits to farmers on rock-strewn properties near Melbourne, photographing what was available.) With systems like these in place, the process of developing the site was speeded up while quality was maintained.

For both it was a learning experience. Robin Edmond helped Ellis understand and accept the methods now required of the landscape architect working on large-scale projects, and he encouraged Ellis to communicate his own methods more closely. For his part, Edmond said working with Ellis was one of the special times of his life. 'He was very modest but very determined. He pointed out aspects that 1 hadn't observed properly before, he taught me important early lessons. I learned that rocks should be used only where appropriate, I learned how to use them as a material in the landscape, how to arrange them so that they looked natural, to bury them so that it seemed they were emerging from the earth rather then having been dumped off a truck. Ellis had read widely about the way Japanese landscapers used rocks, and before them the Chinese, he had absorbed all this and he was fascinated by it.

'He taught me that in order to be a landscape architect you don't have to know every plant in the world. He didn't claim to be a horticulturist or a botanist or an ecologist, but he did know how to utilise plants in an urban environment. He knew as much about plants as he needed to know, and I've used that principle ever since. He taught me, too, that for special jobs, whether broad-scale or of intimate detail, if you don't know it all yourself then you find someone who does, not just anyone but someone with a feel for the task.'

Robin Edmond watched the women who planted for Ellis, who would come onto the job with 'rubber gloves and trowels and baskets of small plants'. One such woman worked with a friend during the late 1950s to plant and maintain outcrops he installed, and she remembered Ellis directing in terms like: 'Something big here, something smaller there and something flowering in between'. He then let them do more or less what they thought right, and he was not too proud to learn from them details about the behaviour of plants in certain situations. In 1967-68 he asked Bill Molyneux, the native plant expert, to undertake planting for him on several jobs, instructing: 'I want something narrow there, to go up the wall . . . and something low here, but don't allow it to cover the face of the rock'.

He would say occasionally to colleagues like Grace Fraser and Glen Wilson that he wished he knew more about plants, but although hazy on plant names, he did his homework. His small but select personal library included two fine old books on alpine plants - Jenkins's The Rock Garden, and T.C. Mansfield’s Alpines in Colour and Cultivation. The latter was marked with pencilled ticks, presumably listing plants he liked, or that he knew he could obtain, among them Androsace lanuginosa, Campanula isophylla, Dianthus x Highland Fraser, Iberis sempervirens and Santolina chamaecyparissus.

During the 1960s, Ellis’s office assistant Beverley Hanson, knowing what plants he liked and the effects he preferred, would talk to him about his designs and what he had in mind before preparing detailed planting lists and heading off to buy at the nurseries. He taught her not to do ‘spotty’ planting with one of this and one of that, but to ‘repeat and repeat’; to put in a drift of a plant in one place, then reintroduce it further away. A surviving list of Ellis’s Burnley Horticultural College outcrop and dry creek bed (1962) includes a broad array of Australian plants, among them some of the reedy plants that Ellis loved but are only now being widely used in gardens (like Orthrosanthus multiflorus, Stypandra glauca, Dianella tasmanica). Beverley chose these from the catalogue of Boddy's fine specialist nursery, Eastern Park in Geelong - perhaps from the 1958 catalogue, which was still in Ellis's office at the time of his death.

Today the original part of Elliston (centred round Bachli, Cremin, Ferrier and von Nida Courts) is leafy and secluded, a far cry from the cluster of ten stark new houses, surrounded by bare dirt and fences, to which engineer Robert Dunster came as one of the first residents. He remembered Ellis's contagious enthusiasm at a group meeting, when he discussed his landscape plans. Most early purchasers were married couples with small children so that the common 'ride' that extended between the backs of the first two rows of houses quickly became a hive of activity. A dry, pebbled watercourse ran down the centre of the ride; it was not long before back fences were demolished and the exercise in communal space took on real form.

One resident asked that his funeral service be held there (which it eventually was); another, whose child was physically handicapped and confined to a small cart, built a wooden crossing over the pebbles so that the child could move easily from house to house. Ellis suggested installing a barbecue at the low point where the ride led into the nark. Surrounded by sleeper seats, it developed into an informal meeting-place to which residents could gravitate at any time. If you took a cup or coffee out there it was an invitation for someone to join you

Ellis's work in the adjoining fifty-three acre linear park, which is bisected by Salt Creek, was extraordinarily subtle. He used native trees and shrubs to soften both the broad openings of what used to be fairways, and the lines of planting that had divided the fairways; he made mounds to create and enclose vistas; he installed outdoor seats, low tables and play equipment. The park still has a 'Hampstead Heath' feel to it - 'kites, dogs and children', to quote one regular user.

It is a very Australian space, alternately verdant and dusty, where the rattle from the train that runs along one side is almost drowned out at dusk by the sound of frogs and birds, and where the undulating terrain creates a feeling of space that is rare in any large city. Originally the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works had wanted to put the creek in an underground drain through the park, because it feared the adjacent council subdivision would cause increased stormwater run-off and - given the nature of Salt Creek's bed and banks - accelerated erosion. To Ellis's delight the council opposed this suggestion and asked that it be left as a natural creek. Thereafter the Board generally left responsibility for the creek up to Heidelberg Council, while still requiring permission for new work, and holding the council responsible for expenditure and safety precautions.

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Ellis Stones: Landscape Architect

Shirley Pipitone

Introduction

ELLIS Stones (1895-1975) was Australia's first popular landscape architect, the father of an Australian landscape style. Inspired by the bush, he sought to bring nature to the cities.His subtle style is now pervasive and his pioneering interest in conservation of natural heritage widespread. "One of Australia's most distinguished landscape architects" (Turner, 1975), Stones was highly creative yet gentle and unassuming.

The Life of Ellis Stones

Trained as a builder, Stones was injured at Gallipoli in 1914. After a long period of major operations, acute pain, headaches and depression, Stones resumed building work, in defiance of medical opinion. He married in 1922 and had three daughters.In 1935, a chance meeting with Edna Walling resulted in Stones changing career, first concentrating on garden construction then gradually undertaking design work. Stones constructed many of the rock outcrops, walls and ponds in Walling's gardens. In Australian Home Beautiful of December 1938 Walling wrote: "It is a rare thing this gift for placing stones and strange that a man possessing it should bear the name Stones... Lovely as formal gardens can be, it is these informal schemes, in which boulders form so important a part, that appeal so tremendously... they give us the atmosphere of the country, and the refreshment of mind derived from such" (Latreuille, 1990 p35).After World War II, Stones did significantly more design work. While much of his work in the 60s was in city gardens, he designed some country gardens and factory landscapes, often relegating cars to the rear of the building because he regarded them as a blot on the landscape. He also did voluntary landscape design work, for example at Burnley Horticultural College. In about 1950 he started a small nursery and most orders included a couple of native plants. As he grew older, Stones increasingly suffered from ill-health but he kept on working, bouncing back with incredible energy after any illness. He died in 1975 after a full day's work at Salt Creek.

Landscape Design TechniquesGuiding principle 1: Nature is the greatest teacher

Stones derived his inspiration from the bush and everything he did in the field of landscape, garden design and conservation was influenced by his love of the bush. His landscaping style was so subtle and simple that his gardens often "looked as if they had just 'happened'" (Latreuille, 1990 p xi). He considered that gardens should relate to their natural surroundings, then a minority view in Australia where "the green of the average suburb [was] a horizontal veneer no higher than the reach of a diligent gardener's snippers" (Boyd, 1960 p 28).

To achieve a natural look, Stones:

• eliminated visual boundaries
• softened hard lines of paving, driveways and walls with planting
• retained existing features such as an undulating landform
• used rock outcrops to give a touch of rugged beauty
• used natural materials such as rocks, timber, gravel and brush fencing, and native plants where possible
• sited pools appropriately
• used a limited palette of plants chosen for their shape and texture, their capacity to reveal or conceal, to provide a focal point or a background
• used shadows as a design element
• kept design elements in proportion to the size of the garden.

In 1971, Stones wrote "the architect who designs a house to integrate with the landscape is indeed a great gardener... " (Stones, 1971 p 11).

Guiding principle 2: Gardens are for people

• considering the owner's way of life including possible future changes
• creating effects of greater distance
• screening for privacy, windbreak
• creating a feeling of enclosure in some areas
• creating views from inside the house and from terraces
• using courtyards for outdoor living areas

One of his favourite maxims was "beauty attracts the eye where all the surroundings are unattractive" (Stones, 1971 p 67).

Courtyards

Stones believed that small courtyards should be simple and uncluttered to evoke a feeling of tranquility. He used structural materials suited to the building and the landscape, minimal colour and a limited number and type of plants, and he created seats naturally as part of the courtyard structure.

Use of rock

• rocks should be partly buried to look as though they have been there for ever
• placing rocks to create the appearance of a natural stratum
• varying the size of the rocks
• using boulders to attract the eye from a plain brick wall
• using pebbles and boulders as a dry creek bed in a sometimes wet area
• being bold.

Recognition

In 1965, Stones gained the commission to landscape the architect-designed Merchant Builders project houses in Melbourne, a highly innovative move at a time when architects only rarely considered landscape as integral to their architecture. This commission brought recognition of his ideas and public acclaim. The subdivision Elliston was named after him.In 1966, Stones visited European botanic gardens to obtain ideas for redesigning and improving the Royal Melbourne Botanic Gardens. In letters of introduction to the Directors of several Botanic Gardens, R T M Pescott, Director and Government Botanist, Royal Melbourne Botanic Gardens described Stones as "a landscape designer of considerable repute in this State, who has specialised in the use of stone in garden design" (Pescott, 1966).He was a foundation member of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture and on 6 March 1975, was offered Fellowship of the Institute in recognition of his contribution to landscape architecture in Australia. At that time there were only 10 Fellows of the Institute.

The Visionary

Stones made a significant and lasting contribution to Australian landscape architecture:

• helping to promote the role of the landscape architect and the profession of landscape architecture
• nurturing public interest in the relationship between garden design and nature
• encouraging Australians to appreciate the broader landscape
• helping the average home gardener with garden design
• integrating landscape design and conservation issues.

The role of the landscape architect

Stones saw the role of the landscape architect as critical in retaining the landscape amenity for future generations. In 1969 he wrote that the landscape architect "should come before the bulldozer, not after, as is usually the case" (NLA MS 5188: The Heidelberger 2 July 1969).

Stones supported the establishment of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture (AILA) to give landscape designers professional standing. In the absence of tertiary training in Australia, Stones and others, including professionals, gave public lectures on landscape design which eventually led to a landscape design course at RMIT. Stones was a foundation lecturer of this course.

Encouraging Australians to appreciate the broader landscape

Yencken (1997 p 394) quotes Stones as saying "the type of gardens I wanted to make were to remind people of nature. I realise now the reason I was so interested in landscaping was that my occupation and physical disabilities made it necessary to live most of my time in the city, when I wanted to live with nature. So unconsciously I was trying to bring nature to the cities and trying to keep some of the bushland areas in the cities." Stones encouraged interest in the broader Australian landscape, aiming to create a link between gardens and the natural landscape.

Helping home gardeners with garden design

Stones gave the landscape architecture profession a public profile. According to Latreuille (1990 p xii) "he really wanted to help people improve their environment and in so doing, to make cities and towns appear more natural. He maintained that he must always be available to anyone who wanted his services, at a cost they could afford".In 1946, Stones started to write articles for Australian Home Beautiful, Unlike Walling, he intended his articles and books to help people improve their gardens themselves. He focussed on effects that could be achieved in a small space.

Integrating Landscape Design and Conservation

Stones's greatest vision was to seek conservation of Australia's natural heritage by sensitive landscape design of public areas. He deplored the climatically unsuitable English influence in domestic gardens and many public parks, the practice of clearing all vegetation before building, and the lack of a public authority to manage and protect the landscape. For freeways he envisioned "the whole length... as a beautiful bushland setting, with the statuesque river red gums a main feature... to welcome visitors to Australia" (Stones, 1974).

Stones was an active conservationist at a time when there was very little interest in preserving Australia's natural heritage. His conservation activities included:

• President of Ivanhoe River Parklands Protection League from 1955 until at least 1963
• presented petition to Heidelberg City Council on 31 January 1956
• honorary landscape architect for the National Trust.
• Vice-President of Save the Yarra League formed in 1958
• member of National Trust Landscape Preservation Council from 1960

During his overseas trip in 1966, he obtained examples of how landscaping can assist water and air pollution and he wrote to many of Melbourne's Town Council's offering to address them on the issue. Their remarkable lack of interest was exemplified by the response from Essendon City Council of 15 February 1967: "It was resolved that the letter be received and the contents noted" (NLA MS 5188).Stones consistently campaigned on conservation issues until his death, expressing concern about such matters as the destruction of forests for the woodchip industry and the environmentally destructive potential of town planners. He loved the quiet beauty of the Yarra Valley and he campaigned ceaselessly against the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works policy of diverting creeks underground into concrete drains in the name of flood control. However, he also had a broader vision of integrating landscape design and conservation. In handwritten notes on Trees he wrote: "We are a cock-eyed mob, and are unintentionally helping to destroy this wonderful country" (NLA MS 5188). In a small pocket notebook Stones wrote: "... the natural landscape should be in evidence whenever there is an opportunity. Australia has a distinct landscape... strong and bold even cruel at times. This is our heritage, but we have not valued it when we have had to encroach on any virgin country" (NLA MS 5188).

The Vision Today

Much has changed in Australian landscape architecture in the last 20 years. Australian gardens and public landscapes now pay far more attention to style, even though this is still often Featurist, to use Boyd's term. While there is some acceptance of Australian plants, garden and landscape design usually still bear little relationship to the Australian landscape, particularly the indigenous landscape.Stones was way ahead of his time and his influence is widespread, yet the calls continue for Australian landscape architects to replace the dominant gardenesque style with ecological sustainability (Bull, 1996), to emphasise Australia's distinct environmental qualities (Mackenzie, 1996), to accept native plants in our streets, parks and gardens (Snape, 1996).Some progress has occurred in relation to conservation, for example, more landscapes are being classified by the National Trust of Australia, and the Melbourne Board of Works has preserved parts of the remaining natural land along the Yarra Valley for metropolitan parks.Snape (1996) says we need a vision, but we have the pioneering vision given us by Stones. Stones arrived on the scene at a time when an Australian consciousness was beginning to emerge. His vision was forward-looking and different, seeking a way to integrate this emerging Australian consciousness through landscape. "Ellis Stones is remembered for his gentle, unassuming nature, his warmth and enthusiasm, his tenacity, and most of all his talent in... landscape design. He was a simple man with a simple approach. Halfway through his long life he found that he had a gift for creating beauty, and he spent the rest of that life sharing it with others" (Latreuille, 1990 p xi), using native plants, rock forms and water to emulate and extend our peculiarly Australian landscape.

Bibliography

Boyd, R. (1960). The Australian Ugliness, Cheshire, Melbourne.

Bull, C. A purposeful aesthetic? Valuing landscape style and meaning in the ecological age. Landscape Australia 18(1)

.Latreuille, A. (1990). The Natural Garden, Ellis Stones: His Life and Work, Viking O'Neil, South Yarra, Victoria.

Mackenzie, B. (1996). An Australian Design Ethos. Landscape Australia 18(2).

National Library of Australia. Stones, E. Papers, manuscript, MS 5188.

Snape, D. (1996). The importance of Australia's indigenous plants. Landscape Australia 18(3).Stones, E. (1954). Save our Bushland, Argus, 13/8/54, in NLA MS 5188.Stones, E. (1971). Australian Garden Design, Macmillan, Melbourne.

Stones, E. (1973) Vandals in Grey Flannel Suits, Herald 17/10/73, in NLA MS 5188

Stones, E. (1974). Letter to Melbourne Lord Mayor 2/11/74, in NLA MS 5188.

Stones, E. (1976). The Ellis Stones Garden Book, Thomas Nelson (Australia), West Melbourne.

Turner, J. (1975). A Tribute, National Trust Newsletter 3(11), in NLA MS 5188.

Upper Yarra Valley/Dandenong Ranges Authority & Melbourne Board of Works. (1987). Upper Yarra River Revegetation and Land Management Guidelines.

Yencken, D. (1997). Edna Walling and Ellis Stones, Landscape Australia 19(4).

Republished from the December 2001 issue of the Newsletter of the Canberra Region of the Society for Growing Australian Plants. & Australian Plants online

with kind permission of Shirley Pipitone