'Tommy Garnett, creator of the famous Garden of St Erth at Blackwood, Victoria, became one of Australia’s best-known garden writers, a rational crusader for plants, gardens and gardeners, birds, nature conservation and the environment. Few of his devoted readers knew anything of his life before the garden – the experiences that informed the wise, crisp, erudite, playful newspaper columns and books. Half of his long life – he died in 2006 aged 91 – was as an Englishman, half as an Australian. He was an innovative, controversial, successful head of two world-famous schools, England’s Marlborough College and Australia’s Geelong Grammar. Had he been a snob he could have boasted of his family’s literary connections or rattled off long lists of distinguished students, staff and colleagues who acknowledged his influence – poets, cricketers, princes, scholars, ornithologists, scientists, artists. Nor did he boast of his own sporting triumphs (first-class cricketer, British Eton Fives champion) or of his tough war years as a ground-based RAF squadron leader, decorated for service behind enemy lines, in Bengal and Burma. Born into wealth, thrown into penury, surviving as a scholarship boy, finding the love of his life after the war, Garnett was a man of accomplishment and wisdom, forever open to new insights and to new experiences. Australia reaped the benefit.' (Publication summary)
'Two very big books about two rich and varied lives, linked by their successive terms as headmaster of Geelong Grammar School (GGS). James Ralph Darling served three decades and retired somewhat jaded by education but reluctant to relinquish authority; Thomas Ronald Garnett set himself twelve years in harness, stuck to his limit, then built himself an entirely new career as one of Australia's greatest gardeners and garden writers. Darling in retirement was no slouch, serving as possibly the best-ever chair of the ABC, fending off attacks on its independence from political (but mostly conservative) critics and interferers, and standing up for quality public broadcasting and high standards in cultural and civic life. Hence if the setting is the same red-brick gleaming towers by Corio Bay, the men, their lives and the marks they made as educators and public figures were very different.' (Introduction)
'Two very big books about two rich and varied lives, linked by their successive terms as headmaster of Geelong Grammar School (GGS). James Ralph Darling served three decades and retired somewhat jaded by education but reluctant to relinquish authority; Thomas Ronald Garnett set himself twelve years in harness, stuck to his limit, then built himself an entirely new career as one of Australia's greatest gardeners and garden writers. Darling in retirement was no slouch, serving as possibly the best-ever chair of the ABC, fending off attacks on its independence from political (but mostly conservative) critics and interferers, and standing up for quality public broadcasting and high standards in cultural and civic life. Hence if the setting is the same red-brick gleaming towers by Corio Bay, the men, their lives and the marks they made as educators and public figures were very different.' (Introduction)
