Galbraith, Jean (1906 - 1999)
Born 28 March 1906; died on 2 January 1999.
The Sydney Morning Herald,
11 January 1999 – OBITUARIES:
Botanist, writer 1906-1999
She was the last of a species.
Jean Galbraith, a member of that proud sisterhood which embraced the
twin crafts of gardening and writing, was a hardy perennial who has died
at the age of 92. The tradition started with Gertrude Jekyll (1846-1937)
and occupies a minor but honourable place in English literature. Edna Walling,
born early in the 1890s, brought her remarkable talents to Australia and
Jean Galbraith became her natural successor. Galbraith shared certain characteristics
with her cultural antecedents. She was independent, highly professional
and utterly devoted to her crafts. Gardening and writing were, to her,
indivisible. It was only natural to write of the living things you loved
most.
She respected men without entering into intimate relations with them.
True, young men were somewhat scarce between the wars when she was of marriageable
age, but one suspects that if suitors had knocked on her door she would
have rejected them with her sweet courtesy. Most women could marry and
have babies, but Galbraith's talents were unique and might have been vitiated
by family life.
She was deeply religious and her natural warmth found its focus in loving
friendship with those sharing common interests. In her case, this meant
with women and men who shared ber passionate involvement with the natural
world.
Galbraith was a secondgeneration Australian, her grandparents having
emigrated from Scotland to north-eastern Victoria in the middle of the
19th century. Sixty years later, Beechworth was still a prosperous mining
town with 50 pubs and Galbraith's grandparents and parents decided this
was no place to bring up children.
The extended family moved to Tyers, in central Gippsland, where her
father, too poor to afford anything better, took up land covered with stringy
tussock grass. Their beautiful valley did, however, prove compensation.
"Tangles of wiregrass grew on the sheltered slopes and gullies," Galbraith
wrote. "A haven for tree-ferns and ground-ferns, musk and blanket-leaf,
and wattles with lianas of Wonga vine and clematis hanging like rope from
a tree."
She grew up in a house called Dunedin, in a family of gardeners. Her father
planted oaks and elms and native species, and when her brothers grew up
and went off teaching they made "a chain of gardens around the State".
Galbraith used the pseudonym "Correa" for her early journalism and for
50 years contributed monthly to two magazines, The Garden Lover and the
Victorian Naturalist. She also wrote for The Age newspaper and wrote
nine books - or 14 if you count retrospective and expanded editions of
her early titles. They ranged from standard texts such as A Field Guide
to Wildflowers of South Eastern Australia (1977) and probably her best-known
book, Wildflowers of Victoria (1950), to the children's book Grandma
Honeypot (1964).
Garden in a Valley (1985) is a charming, discursive account of
events in her life, the nearest she came to an autobiography. It is reminiscent
of, but less twee than, the tales told by a British writer, the late Marian
Cran.
After her parents died, Galbraith continued to develop the garden created
in the year of her birth. She grew plants ancient and modern. She observed
the minutest detail of her plants and knew every centimetre of her garden
and how the times of the day and the days of the year affected her beloved
plants. Sue Forrester of the Melbourne native plant nursery Austraflora
remembers her with affection. Galbraith was a friend of Forrester and her
mother, Gwynnyth Taylor, who was a landscape designer I with Edna Walling.
"Miss Galbraith was full of charm and possessed a quirky sense of humour
which endeared her to me and other children. Her eyes would light up with
enthusiasm when she described a particularly beautiful plant," Forrester
recalls. "She was intensely feminine and always immaculate. She never wore
trousers, not even in the bush, but always a skirt. Her hair was plaited
in a coil around her head and she wore granny glasses."
Galbraith grew old in her comfortable, cluttered house with its books,
paintings, pressed plants, photographs and seashells. Her great friend
John Turner, a professor of botany, wrote: "Her living room and the old
garden express her character inquiring and tenacious, devout, friendly
and tranquil. It expresses her love of life and of living things."
She lived there until four years ago, and then in a retirement village
in Traralgon.
Collecting localities for 'Galbraith, J.' from AVH (2021)
Data from 1,388 specimens
