St Vincent Gardens facts for kids
St Vincent Gardens is a beautiful park in Albert Park, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. It's a really important place because it shows how towns were planned a long time ago. Imagine a big, green square with homes built all around it! This design was popular in London, England, and after the Victorian gold rush in Australia, people wanted to build fancy places like this here too.
The gardens are shaped like a big rectangle with curved ends. The whole area, including the nearby St Vincent Place precinct, is a special heritage site. A tram line for route 1 even runs right through the middle! Many streets around the park still have their original bluestone cobblestones and gutters. The gardens are so important that they are listed on the Victorian Heritage Register for their beauty, history, architecture, and social meaning to the state of Victoria.
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Why St Vincent Gardens Are Special
These gardens are very important, especially for the people who live nearby. They show what middle-class families in South Melbourne hoped for in their community. Because everyone shared the gardens, people living around them felt like a strong community. This was quite unusual for Melbourne back then!
The gardens have always been a central place for community life. The local government has worked hard to keep them nice since they were first created. For over a hundred years, the park has even had tennis and bowls clubs, which shows how much people love using the space together.
A famous Australian expert on populations, Bernard Salt, even called St Vincent Place one of his favorite places designed by town planners. He said it was a "treasure" because of its two long, curved streets built around the gardens. Fancy Victorian houses looked over the gardens, while smaller homes for servants were built on the outer streets. It was almost like a private community for the wealthy people back in the 1850s.
A Look Back: History of the Gardens
The first design for St Vincent Gardens was probably made around 1854 or 1855 by Andrew Clarke, who was a surveyor for Victoria. Later, in 1857, Clement Hodgkinson changed the design a bit to make space for the St Kilda railway line, Melbourne.
The gardens were actually built between 1864 and 1870. Clement Hodgkinson's plans from 1869 show how the park was laid out, including where trees were planted and how the paths curved, especially at the eastern end.
The Albert Park Bowls Club, which is still there today, was started in the park in 1873.
The gardens got a refresh between 1903 and 1910, but most of the original design was kept. In 2004, a Canary Island Palm tree had to be removed because it got sick with a disease called fusarium wilt.
Recently, the gardens have looked even better thanks to local government projects. These projects followed a special plan to protect the gardens. For example, they added mulch around important trees to help them grow. They also brought back old-fashioned flower beds using plants that were popular long ago.
One big change was rebuilding the paths in the western part of the gardens. They used the original orange-colored sand and steel edges, just like they were in the past. They also added a clever system to use rainwater to water the lawns, which saves water! The hedge around the gardens was replanted using a special type of Lonicera plant from Dame Elisabeth Murdoch's farm. This hedge will grow to be about 70 centimeters tall.
New entrances have also been designed for the gardens. They look just like the original ones, with bluestone walls and wooden posts. Work on these new entrances in the western part of the gardens started recently. Even the plants in the northern and southern garden beds have been carefully chosen to match old designs.
Plants and Special Memorials
The gardens have many different kinds of plants. You can see rows of Algerian Oak trees (Quercus canariensis) and tall Canary Island Palms (Phoenix canariensis).
Other interesting plants you might find include:
- Brush cherry
- Coral Tree
- Lilly Pilly
- Moreton Bay fig
- Norfolk Island pine
- Peony
- Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)
- Whitewillow
There's also a special garden that remembers two Australian entertainers, Maurie Fields and his wife Val Jellay, who used to live in the area.
You'll also find the Charles Moore Memorial Drinking Fountain. This fountain honors Charlie Moore, who was a soldier in the Second Boer War and a great football player for the Essendon Football Club. He was born in Fiji in 1875 and sadly died in South Africa in 1901.
The Alexander Rose Garden is another special spot. It honors Harold Alexander, who was the Clerk of the City of South Melbourne for many years (1936-1964). He did a lot to help people in the community. For example, he helped set up Australia's first "community chest" for social welfare and after the war, he helped provide hot meals to soldiers returning home. These ideas led to today's senior citizens clubs. He also hired the council's first social worker and started Australia's first "meals on wheels" service in 1953. He even helped create an aged care home called 'Claremont.' Before all this, he also played football for the South Melbourne Football Club for five years!
Gallery
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A terrace house with a French-style mansard roof tower.
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A Victorian terrace house facing the gardens, showing its rich details.
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The beautiful gardens at the center of the square.
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Rochester Terrace, a row of historic houses.
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A closer look at the main pavilion of Rochester Terrace.
