1964 GARDEN GUIDE

I have been looking through some more of my father's old catalogues from Lasscock's Nursery. This time the 1964 edition plus a garden plan guide. It just shows that what comes around goes around, in a lot of ways. There are two pages of "shrubs and trees to withstand severe heat" and several pages on vegetables and fruit trees. Interestingly all the plants in the catalogue are listed by their botanical names(except for fruit and veg), with common names for only some and those are in brackets. No catering to the uneducated in those days! This is a comprehensive 90 page book which was produced annually and posted all over the country because Lasscock's, in 1964, was the largest nursery in The Commonwealth (as Australia was often called back then), and went on to being the largest in the southern hemisphere - something my father was very proud of.

On the left is one of a series of suggested garden plans. I loved looking through them today and seeing what was grown where, when I was 6 years old. Every plan included a vegetable garden and ranged from a few to many fruit trees. As I said before, all the lists are of botanical names and they are familiar enough to me because my father taught me the names of thousands of shrubs and trees from a very young age, although I had no idea what they looked like! It was rather an exercise in spelling, mental athletics and pronunciation, I think!

Here are some of the advertisements in that catalogue. These 3 businesses are still going today in Adelaide, although their addresses have changed.