Rose (closed, reference only) Nursery  

Listing last updated on Wed Aug 2024

Glenferie Road North, Hawthorn,


Glenferie Road North
Hawthorn, Victoria
Australia

2002 Richard Aitken & Michael Look “Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens”
p338. Thomas Johnson 1821-1907 rose grower, arrived in Melbourne from Britain c1850. He purchased land in Hawthorn by 1853 and ran a rose nursery there in the 1860s and 1870s. Johnson’s booklet The Culture of the Rose (1866) – the first Australian monograph on Roses – gave detailed if slightly idiosyncratic, instructions on propagation, culture and exhibition on the show bench. The preface, written by Ferdinand Mueller, praised the virtues of ‘these noble flowers’ as well as the useful directions ‘offered by so observant a man as Thomas Johnson’. He won many prizes at Horticultural shows, particularly for his roses, and supplied ‘a fine collection of standard roses’ to William Guilfoyle for Melbourne Botanic Gardens during 1874-75. Johnson’s business folded around 1878, at the same time as he disappeared from the active - although somewhat controversial - role he had taken in the affairs of the local council. He worked with his son-in-law, Thomas Ellison, growing roses in Preston in the early 1880s. By 1894 he ran a florist’s shop and nursery in Mentone and continued to grow roses, his 1895 catalogue was noted by the Leader for ‘new seedling roses of his own raising’. This veteran rosarian died in 1907 and was buried in Boroondara Cemetery, for which he had been one of the first trustees. Helen Botham.