ABSTRACT
The analogy was drawn in the first chapter between the founding of national parks and the defiance required by gardeners. Heartbreaks are inseparable from gardening, whether inflicted by the weather, pests and diseases, or human miscalculation and trespass. Henry Mitchell wrote of how ‘I never see a great garden (even in my mind’s eye) … but I think of the calamities that have visited it’. No less fortitude was required in managing the national parks now found on every inhabited continent, the analogy being further pursued in Mitchell’s comment that, however well-established the gardens might seem in appearance, ‘many treasures have died, many great schemes abandoned, many temporary triumphs have come to nothing and worse than nothing’ (Mitchell, 1981, pp2–3). National parks have been no less dynamic, any permanency of achievement proving no more certain.
