Render the hospital beautiful.
“Every effort should be made to render the hospital beautiful … Colour schemes for the various wards, furniture to match, access to the gardens, and views from the patient’s room … ”
From early in its history, The Maitland Hospital’s location on Campbell’s Hill attracted favourable comments. The building and its gardens could be viewed from the floodplain and, as the local newspaper reported in 1849, the hospital’s verandahs provided ‘a beautiful view of Maitland and the rich agricultural plains around it, bounded by hills in every direction.’ Verandahs, with their fresh air and vistas, were regularly used as wards.
Frederick Terry, Long Bridge, West Maitland, 1855.
(National Library of Australia)
The hospital is on the rise to the right and back of the etching. The artist has included a formal landscaped garden in front of the building.
View from the Maitland Hospital across the Mt Pleasant floodplain, early 1950s.
(Maitland Hospital Collection Item 165.38)
The upstairs verandah in the 1905 building in use as a male public ward, late 1930s.
(Maitland Hospital Collection 165.129)
Attention was also paid to planting flowers, shrubs and trees, and to landscaping different parts of the site. In 1890 and under the supervision of the matron, Jessica Davey, flower beds and a rockery were formed, and a request went out for donations of ‘plants from those who are over-stocked with them’. The aim was for patients to ‘have pleasant surroundings in their temporary home.’
With the new ‘handsome and substantial’ hospital building that opened in 1905, there was a renewed effort to landscape the surroundings. By January 1913, for example, the work of ‘beautifying the grounds by the planting of trees’ had been carried out.
Trees and other plantings in front of the 1905 building, about 1915.
(Maitland City Library)
The mid-1930s witnessed a particularly robust and concerted effort to enhance the hospital grounds. It was initiated and led by the hospital’s honorary supervising engineer William Lindsay. The results included ‘25 young willow trees’ planted along the creek at the base of the hospital site, and jacaranda trees planted towards the Long Bridge along with a few silky oaks and ‘two dozen young wattle trees’. There were also mixed shrubs in front of the isolation nurses’ cottage; ‘a bed of hydrangeas … with a plot of German irises’ near the new ward block; ivy geraniums over the wall near the nurses’ home; and scrub poinsettias ‘to eliminate the bare aspect’ of the northernmost corner of the grounds. The new plantings complemented the rose and other gardens already well established near the main entrance gates.
The 1930s landscaping provided a foundation for the following decades.
Views of gardens and grounds, 1930s to 1960s.
(Maitland Hospital Collection)
In 2020, vestiges of this impressive history of the thoughtful creation and use of hospital gardens and grounds are evident in the snatches of garden and shrubbery contained between buildings. However, as with the buildings themselves, the gardens and lawns are a patchwork. There are mature and magnificent trees; well-kept clutches of lawn; carefully tended plants and flowers; and buildings framed evocatively by trees and shrubs. There are also poorly tended corners; greenery blighted by signs and rubbish; failing garden furniture; no overall landscape plan; patches overgrown with weeds; and limited inviting access to lawns and gardens for patients, staff or visitors.
Views of the Maitland Hospital grounds, 2020.
(Janis Wilton)
Like the growth of the Maitland Hospital buildings and services, the gardens and grounds have had to adapt to different spaces and new buildings. There were periods when resources, time and space made landscape planning and planting possible. There is also a pattern of adapting, reshaping, removing, adding a bit here, saving a bit there. As well, views to and from the hospital have altered dramatically with what has become a jigsaw, even jumble, of buildings obscuring sight lines and vistas. Underpinning the planning and the ad hoc solutions to outside spaces, however, there was and is the understanding that gardens, landscapes and access to them have therapeutic value for patients, visitors, staff and members of the public.
References
Maitland Mercury, 12 May 1849, 9 September 1890, 30 January 1913, 24 July 1934.
Sydney Morning Herald, 8 October 1936.