Australian Dictionary of Biography

Claude Crowe at Anderson's Nursery, Summer Hill, 1942

Caroline Simpson Library, Museums of History NSW, CSL&RC MSS 2004/3: Claude Crowe Papers: CCC/P/5

Claude Colquhoun Crowe (1914–1999), plantsman and garden designer, was born on 15 December 1914 at Mundaroo in the Upper Murray region of New South Wales, eldest of four children of Victorian-born John Colquhoun Crowe, grazier, and his New South Wales-born wife Margaret Rial, nee Wanklyn. Mundaroo, a grazing and agricultural property, belonged to Claude’s paternal grandfather, the Irish-born Colquhoun Crowe, who had made his first land purchase in the Upper Murray in the late 1860s. The dispersal of his estate not long after Claude’s birth meant that John worked for most of his life as a stockman and drover. Claude’s mother’s family, the Wanklyns and Rials, traced their Australian origins to emancipated convicts turned early squatters in the Riverina district.

Shaped by his father’s shifting employment, Crowe’s education began with kindergarten at Albury and primary school at Bowna, then Albury Rural School, and finally Albury High School, where he studied agriculture subjects. He was an active member of the Albury Junior Farmers’ Club, serving for a time as its president. Around the same time, he joined the 1st Albury Troop of the Boy Scouts’ Association, becoming assistant scoutmaster in 1933. He was also a founding member of the Albury Rover Crew. From an early age he was interested in gardening, influenced by the gardens that his mother made; by childhood picnics in the Albury Botanic Gardens; and by the gift of a Primula malacoides in a three-inch pot from the Albury nurseryman Ernie Stanton. He gained his Intermediate certificate in the Depression, and found part-time work as a gardener at Albury High School and at the Hume Flour Mills, supplemented with work as an odd-job man doing garden maintenance.

In 1938 Crowe secured a job with Anderson & Co. Ltd, seedsmen and plant merchants, a Sydney firm that had recently opened a new head office and nursery in Parramatta Road, Summer Hill. The company had a flourishing landscape department that took on commissions across Sydney and throughout New South Wales. At Andersons he met and learnt from Paul Sorensen, an established nurseryman and landscape gardener, who was working as a contractor for the company. During this time he met his future wife, Isobel Florence Tacon, who in 1938 was part of the first cohort of the newly established gardening and horticultural certificate course at Sydney Technical College, graduating in 1941 as top of the class.

By 1941 Crowe had become the manager of Anderson’s garden planning department. After Japan entered World War II in December 1941, his job there, classified as a reserved occupation, brought engagement with two special wartime projects. The first involved work with the camouflage research section of the Department of Home Security, preparing planting schemes and providing trees and shrubs for use as elements in the camouflage of military infrastructure. The second involved supplying vegetable seeds for the Commonwealth Vegetable Seeds Committee, established in February 1942 to ensure adequate stocks in the event of disruption of the usual imports from Europe and the United States of America.

Anderson & Co. headed the committee’s list of approved seed merchants authorised to contract for seed production. The company, already involved with Sorensen in developing a cold climate nursery at the Old Rectory, Berrima, sent Crowe to manage the vegetable seed operation. Eight months later Isobel Tacon joined him, following their marriage on 6 March 1943 at St John’s Church of England, Dee Why, the ceremony conducted by Isobel’s father, the Reverend R. F. Tacon. When Andersons withdrew from Berrima in September 1943, the couple stayed, establishing their own business, Berrima Bridge Nurseries. Crowe, already familiar with some significant Southern Highlands gardens from his work with Anderson’s, not only maintained those connections but soon found himself planning homestead gardens for new clients as far afield as the Monaro and the central west of New South Wales. For the duration of the war, however, Claude and Isobel mostly grew ‘mother seed,’ strains of seed most suited to Australia’s market garden requirements, for United Seed Growers Pty Ltd, a company headed by the well-known seedsman Eric Rumsey.

Beginning with two acres of flood-prone land on the Wingecarribee River, Berrima Bridge Nurseries grew to around twenty-three acres, with cold frames; artificially heated glass houses used for propagation and experimental work in the winter months; and a watering system installed throughout the property. Claude and Isobel grew most varieties of cold-climate ornamental trees, shrubs, and conifers, and the nursery quickly became a significant ‘influence on the broad character of the cultivated landscape of the Southern Highlands’ (Chris & Charlotte Webb Pty Ltd 2013, 8). He was acknowledged as an authority on a number of plant species, including malus, maples, prunus, and cotoneasters, and he was recognised as the cultivator of two new plants (Acer palmatum dissectum, or ‘Berrima Bridge,’ and Calocedrus decurrens, or ‘Berrima Gold’).

A soft-spoken, unassuming man, Crowe was interested in his family history and conscientiously tended the isolated grave of his Wanklyn great-grandparents at Little Billabong. He cherished an annual fishing holiday at Tuross Head in company with an old friend. Deeply engaged with his community, he had resumed his involvement with scouting soon after the move to Berrima, earning in 1991 the President’s award for exceptional service to the scouting movement. He was a regular judge at local horticultural and flower shows, and gave his time and expertise freely to local church and civic tree-planting schemes. Defining himself as a plantsman and garden designer, Crowe eschewed the term horticulturist and made no claims to landscape architecture, but his contribution to garden planting and design extended across New South Wales. In 1999 he was appointed OAM for his services to the nursery industry and to the scouting movement. He died on 31 October 1999 at Bowral, survived by his wife and their two daughters, Florence and Merrilyn, and one son, Noel; he was cremated.