Thomas Shepherd – ‘the oldest professed gardener in the Colony’

    4 November 2023

    October 2023

    Thomas Shepherd is one of the contributors to the early development of the Australian foodscape who has been left out of its history. This article seeks to redress this through documenting his work in establishing and managing the Darling Nursery, one of the first commercial nurseries in Australia, and reviewing his writings on horticulture –  letters to newspapers and his 1834 series of lectures  on cultivating fruits and vegetables published as Lectures On the Horticulture of New South Wales Delivered at the Mechanics’ School of Arts . Shepherd also lectured on landscape gardening and these lectures are printed in Lectures on Landscape Gardening in Australia.

    Read more


    Share

    Big Mulch

    Paul van Reyk
    My first essay on food was in Year 10 - people seemed to like it. It took me 56 years to come back to it, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My focus is on Anglo-Saxon settler culinary ways in Australia, roughly from the first days of colonisation to the 1960s - 1970s. I particularly write about stuff that has not been written about before but is very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon Australian table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.