On a tour with palms: a botanical foray into the Caroline Simpson Library

A search for palms in the museum collections took this researcher on a journey back to a time when these plants were considered an essential addition to the tasteful home.

I am sitting in the Caroline Simpson Library in the historic Mint complex in central Sydney. I’m surrounded by glass-fronted cabinets containing rare books, trade catalogues, seed catalogues and who knows what else, each in its own specially made grey archival box. It’s quiet, the air conditioning hums, and the shutters block out the sun and the view to the 1816 Rum Hospital building across the courtyard. On the fabric-covered table, nestled on a special cushion, is a photo album.

I’ve looked at this album many times on the online catalogue, and now here it is with its faded grey cover and the title ‘Bangoola’ and ‘Mosman 1912’ in gold lettering. It’s held together at the spine with a brown cord. The cardboard pages feel fragile; their edges are a faded light grey and they feel soft. The photographs are black and white, slightly sepia toned, and slotted into corners cut in the pages. Each photograph has a caption in gold lettering.

I am in the library because my brief is to find and map references to palms in Museums of History NSW’s collections and explore their cultural significance as research for a potential future project. My search started with the library’s pictures collection. Many of the images are historical photographs, and because the focus of the Caroline Simpson Library is on the history of the home, most of what I found when I entered ‘palm’ into the database were photographs of domestic interiors and gardens.

One group of photographs that caught my eye was from an album dedicated to a house in Mosman, a harbourside suburb on Sydney’s lower north shore. The house, called ‘Bangoola’, was built around 1905 and photographed in 1912. Eight of the 13 photographs in the album show palms; altogether I counted 11 of the plants – two growing in the ground outside and nine potted palms indoors (although some may have been photographed more than once). What intrigued me was that ‘Bangoola’ was home to a family of eight, the Schreiterers – mother, father and six children – and yet there are no people in the photographs. The only living beings visible are plants, and most of these are palms.

Why palms?

Palms were immensely popular in the 19th century and their popularity continued into the early 20th century. In Europe and Britain they were imported as exotic plants; conjuring images of warm and distant places, they quickly became seen as an essential addition to the tasteful home. In 1907, the prominent English horticulturist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll noted scathingly that the potted palm ‘pervaded nearly every sitting-room’.¹

No doubt partly due to their popularity in Europe and Britain, palms were also highly fashionable in Australia. Local seed and plant catalogues, of which the Caroline Simpson Library boasts a large collection, don’t hold back with their praise of palms. The Yates’ Annual from 1912 (the same year ‘Bangoola’ was photographed) claims that: ‘No plants are more graceful or better adapted for house and table’.² Forty-three years earlier, in 1869, the Darling Nursery catalogue stated that this ‘graceful and highly ornamental tribe of plants has been much overlooked in this colony. Palms should form a conspicuous feature in all pleasure gardens’.³ Much later, in 1926, the Law, Somner Pty Ltd catalogue still advises that ‘Palms are indispensable for decorative purposes’.⁴

Tour of the house

The photographs in the ‘Bangoola’ album follow a sequence that introduces us to the house as if being taken on a tour. It was a type of album produced by photography studios for proud homeowners. In the absence of human beings, our ‘tour guide’ is the palm, and our first introduction to the house is provided by the two palms growing on the lawn out the front: the one on the right looks like a cabbage tree palm. As we enter the house, the potted palms take over.

Hall: hardy palms

The first room shown in the album is the hall. Together with a few items of furniture, a rug and pictures on the walls, the room holds two potted palms. With their spindly arching fronds, they look like they could be kentia palms. The 1912 Yates’ Annual has 14 different species of palms for sale, including three varieties of kentia.⁵ Originally from Lord Howe Island, these are, along with several other listed palms, native to Australia. The catalogue describes kentias as ‘the hardiest and most useful of all Palms’, and this robustness was one reason for their popularity in Europe as potted plants. In 1869, Charles Moore, the director of the Botanic Garden in Sydney, had sent kentia palm seeds to the curator of Kew Gardens, Sir Joseph Hooker, and these palms soon joined other varieties as a favourite indoor decoration item.⁶

Dining room: palms at the centre

The album includes two photographs of the dining room, each taken from opposite sides of the room. A potted palm, placed high on its stand, appears light and elegant amid the dark, heavy upholstered dining furniture and weighty-looking tablecloth. The Schreiterers’ dining table is adorned with flowers and a begonia, rather than palms, but palms were often placed in the middle of a table at this time. Henry Sewell’s plant catalogue of 1920 makes a point of this when it claims, ‘As decorative plants for the Conservatory, Shadehouse, or Dinner Table, this order of plants is not surpassed by any other’.⁷ Numerous photographs of Australian homes from 1869 to the late 1920s illustrate, literally and figuratively, how central palms were to tasteful decoration of the time.

Drawing room: palm-specific furniture

The furniture in the ‘Bangoola’ drawing room is lighter, more elegant; more like the ‘graceful’ palm. As in the other rooms, the potted palms are elevated on waist-high stands specifically created for the purpose. Called ‘palm stands’, these items hint at how important palms were in designing a tasteful home. Trade catalogues of the period show the different types that were available, and the Anthony Hordern & Sons catalogue from 1912 has a palm stand made of kauri and finished in a rosewood colour that looks identical to one in the Schreiterer home.⁸ The 1890 catalogue of the London-based Army & Navy Auxiliary Cooperative Supply Ltd includes potted palms in their illustrations of drawing and dining room furniture. After leafing through one of their catalogues, you would be in no doubt that if you didn’t already have a potted palm, you should quickly get one.⁹

And then there are the pots. The photos of ‘Bangoola’ show two different types – a straight-sided pot, made from what looks like terracotta, and a glazed pot with curved sides and floral decoration. The drawing room photographs show both types, and the glazed pot is of a style that features in many trade catalogues. The 1912 catalogue from the Sydney-based retailer F Lassetter & Co Ltd advertised such pots, telling potential buyers that ‘We can securely pack pots and palms to travel by rail’.¹⁰ So it seems that when you bought a pot, they supplied a palm to go with it.

Bedrooms: palm-free zones

There are no plants in the bedrooms at ‘Bangoola’. Maybe this absence also tells us something. Although plants were generally regarded as healthy additions to a home, and palms were thought to clear the air of toxins, some people believed that plants emitted poisonous gases into the air, especially at night.¹¹ As a result, plants were not placed in bedrooms or were removed for the night. This notion persisted into the 20th century. Maybe the Schreiterers held such a belief.

Colonnade: central, but for how long?

The most intriguing photograph in the album, titled ‘Colonnade’, shows the balcony. Here, it looks as though time has stopped. Two chairs are positioned facing each other, angled away from the view of Middle Harbour. There is a rug on the floor between the chairs, and a table with a tablecloth laid over it. The only living thing on the balcony is a single potted palm.

Sitting at the centre of the photograph, this palm could almost be claiming its place as an important decorative item, as if fully aware of its elegance, grace and popularity. It doesn’t realise that it could go out of fashion. Unlike many other commentators of the time, Gertrude Jekyll, who wrote about palms ‘pervading’ the living room, was not a fan of keeping them indoors, stating that she liked ‘rooms best without them, only making an exception in the case of Palms that are quite small, so that they have about the same decorative value as a well-grown Fern’.¹² Incidentally, the copy of Jekyll’s book that is held in the Caroline Simpson Library has several uncut pages, including the three pages where she talks about palms. To read the content, I had to hold the pages open and take a photograph with my phone. Perhaps the fact that the pages are uncut shows that the former owner of the book shared Jekyll’s lack of enthusiasm for palms.

By 1928 there were clear signs that palms were falling out of favour. In that year, an article in The Home: The Australian Journal of Quality includes delightfully forthright comments from prominent artists and architects of the time. Artist Thea Proctor ‘feels a distaste for … palm stands and palms’, while artist Roy de Maistre says that ‘palm plants in pots … have long ago proved themselves to be the last resort of the destitute decorator’, and architect Reymond Synnot gives his ‘reasons for eradicating … Palms, as their lines are never in harmony with anything in a normal room’.¹³ So much for grace and elegance.

Local flora: Daranggara in the landscape

The palms in the ‘Bangoola’ album may be graceful and hardy but the label they cannot wear comfortably is that of ‘exotic’. If the potted palms are kentias, then they are native to Lord Howe Island, and if the palm growing outside on the lawn is a cabbage tree palm then it is endemic to the Sydney region and known to the Gadi people as Daranggara. I wonder if the Schreiterers were aware they were following a fashion for something that evoked a warm, tropical and exotic place, at least from a European perspective, but in a place where palms were growing locally.

Maybe there was once a grove of Daranggara here, where I’m sitting, and where the current-day Caroline Simpson Library stands.

I close the album carefully and put it back into its archival sleeve, ensuring the red toggle and string are correctly positioned, and slide it back into its box. It will go back into the storage room until the next person wants to take a ‘tour’ – courtesy of the palms.