True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2000 by John Soluri

Comparing the failure of irrigation to fulfill these dreams in both Australia and California, Tyrrell concludes that changes in fresh fruit markets (lower prices, higher production) weakened the position of small-scale growers. Here, one would like to know more about how market forces beyond price fluctuations may have undermined small-scale cultivators. For example, did the greater emphasis on marketing lead to "quality" standards that compelled growers to rely more heavily on agricultural inputs, thereby increasing production costs and favoring highly capitalized enterprises? Another key question concerns the degree of social and economic stratification among fruit growers. Tyrrell states that reformers such as the Coopers were "neither the poorest nor the richest in California society," a definition that is much too broad to be analytically useful.

The greatest limitation of Tyrrell's framework is its tendency to operate primarily at the level of dreams and visions rather than on the ground. The author acknowledges the importance of class, ethnicity and gender in shaping ideas about landscapes, but readers are given few opportunities to see life on the farms where cross-cultural encounters and class dynamics were played out. Consequently, the reader has little sense of how field hands viewed the landscapes in which they worked. Tyrrell provides some intriguing glimpses of conflict between Asian laborers and their Anglo employers that lead one to wonder if competing ideas about what constituted a "garden" had as much to do with undermining middle class utopias as the scientific bureaucracies and monopoly capitalism cited by the author.

The transnational perspective offered in True Gardens of the Gods begins to reconceptualize the environmental histories of Australia and the western United States while reminding readers that the exchange of biota between continents continued long after the voyages of Columbus. The book's innovative framework is a valuable model that merits the attention of environmental historians; its intelligent organization and jargon-free prose make it an excellent choice for undergraduate courses.