Cereal: Melbourne

On Monday, July 21, 1873, an Englishman with a remarkable eye for beauty was appointed director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. William Guilfoyle, a botanist who had migrated to Australia 20 years earlier and explored the country extensively from the sun drenched, subtropical north to the turquoise expanse of the New South Wales coast, had a notion that landscape architecture shouldn’t exist purely in the service of science. Guilfoyle cared enormously about colour, texture, light, and creating vast expanses of scenery. His fine art approach, however, irked his contemporaries who were more interested in designing outdoor spaces as grounds for botanical study. Ferdinand von Mueller, the revered German botanist who was the gardens’ director until Guilfoyle knocked him from his perch, called his 33 year old successor a “nurseryman [with] no claims to scientific knowledge whatsoever”.