True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (review)

True Gardens of the Gods: California--Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930. By Ian Tyrrell (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999) 313 pp. $48.00

During the late nineteenth century, reformers in California and Australia exchanged information about plants and insects, crusaded for irrigation, and shared a garden ideal--a desire for balance and beauty. Tyrrell's True Gardens of the Gods is a comparative history of a trans-Pacific relationship, but it is also the history of a school of thought. A group of scientists, engineers, fruit growers, and social theorists in both countries argued for the "renovation" of nature as a middle way to economic development.

Tyrrell's book is itself a kind of renovation--a reinterpretation of key figures and events in the early history of conservation and Pacific agriculture. Elwood Mead and Henry George appear as advocates of close irrigated settlement and intensive cultivation; George Perkins Marsh and the Australian thinker Ferdinand von Muller appear as advocates of acclimatization, or the transfer of plants from one region to another. Tyrrell will introduce many readers to Ellwood Cooper, a California fruit grower and amateur entomologist who became the most passionate advocate of introduced predator insects as a method of biological control. Cooper's story argues with greater force and detail than any previous account that the domination of chemical pest control in agriculture did not go uncontested, and that an alternative understanding of the rural landscape had capable advocates at the turn of the century. Tyrrell's narrative contributes to a re-evaluation of conservation--its distant origins and intellectual diversity--that has recently become an important subject among environmental historians.

Tyrell depends upon published and manuscript sources--especially books, government reports, newspaper articles, and letters between the primary figures in his account--using them to good effect and tying them to material changes in the landscape. This elegant book could have easily become an awkward double case study, but the author shows genuine and surprising connections between events in Australia and California, particularly the remarkable exchange of trees--eucalyptus going one way and Monterey pine the other. Government reports provide the narrative with the kind of facts-on-the-ground information that is essential to give flesh to its more intellectual sources. Although Tyrrell makes no claims about environmental history (his previous work includes studies about class analysis and temperance), the book depends on many important contributions to this field and will be read by scholars interested in the early thinking behind landscape ecology.

At times, Tyrrell overstates the ideas that he traces. Although a garden ideal may have inspired middle-class people to plant fruit trees for beauty and employment, those desires alone neither provided them a livelihood nor offered them any aid to establish orchards or vineyards. As for the discussion concerning introduced plants and animals, which continues over a number of chapters, acclimitization might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but biological exchange between long isolated ecosystems is now considered an unfolding disaster; introduced plants have become invasive species. Although Tyrrell mentions contemporary opponents to eucalyptus in California, he never uses the criticism to evaluate the garden ideal itself.

Steven Stoll
Yale University

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