Thomas Allen starts nursery in 1838 at site on William Light map for 'Botanical Garden' near North Adelaide
South Australia first surveyor general William Light’s 1837 map for the city of Adelaide showed an area marked “Botanical Garden” beside the River Torrens and near North Adelaide, believed to be where Thomas Allen started the province’s first commercial garden nursery. Allen (at right) was photographed by his son in 1862 and the image given to the City of Adelaide by Ian Westergaard.
Images courtesy Adelaide Park Lands Association.
South Australia’s first commercial garden nursery was set up in 1837 by Thomas Allen who also was probably first governor John Hindmarsh’s gardener and botanist. Allen and his family arrived in South Australia on November 20, 1836, at Kangaroo Island on the Tom O’Shanter, one of the first fleet carrying European settlers to the province.
Allen had advertised his Thomas Allen & Sons horticultural business in even before settlement in the first edition of the South Australian Gazette & Colonial Register, published in London in June 1836. Born in 1787 and living at 18 Argyle Street (off Regent Street) London, Allen could claim the credentials of being a botanist and gardener employed by King William IV to design and plant St James’s and Regent’s Parks in London. Governor Hindmarsh must have entrusted Allen with being his botanist or gardener, based upon references, and gave him £35 in June 1836 to buy seeds and plants to take on the voyage to South Australia.
Until George Stevenson, Hindmarsh’s private secretary and Register editor, could earn title of “father of horticulture” in South Australia with his North Adelaide and Leawood Garden properties, Allen started what another early settler James Chittleborough called in 1838 was the only piece of ground in the province that was cultivated and pleasant to roam through, with “its cucumber and melon beds, and solace from the glare and dust of Currie and Hindley Streets”.
The Adelaide community also unsuccessfully sponsored a botanic garden to be nurtured by colonial botanist John Bailey on the banks of the River Torrens in 1839.
Thomas Allen’s garden, between 1837 and 1840, was described as being on a low swampy piece of land that had formerly been flooded and was capable of “producing astonishing crops of both English and Colonial vegetables”. The location was first thought to have been roughly where the new Royal Adelaide Hospital at the North Terrace, Adelaide city, western end was sited and a plaque was installed there in 1983. Later research placed it as part of governor Hindmarsh’s garden in later Elder Park. But the most research put Allen’s garden on the site allocated to a “Botanical Garden” by first South Australian surveyor general William Light in his plan for the city of Adelaide) near North Adelaide.