James Broadbent

...is perhaps Australia’s most eminent cultural historian whose working life has been devoted to historic buildings and gardens.  He has a profound appreciation for plants which are appropriate historically and aesthetically and which enhance the architectural elements. Some, like Villa Alba in Kew, Victoria, are true restorations while in many cases such as Glenfield near Liverpool, Raheen in Kew and his own The Cottage at Mulgoa, the gardens are adaptations.

Asked about his philosophy, James said that he was most influenced by writers like who wrote that, ..every garden should be a continuation of the house it surrounds, and where the dwelling is old and sleepy the garden too, must be drowsy and lie under the spell of ages...

I live, largely, in a polite, Anglo-centric world of colonial gardens and houses, antiques and decorative arts, but I don’t think that this dominant heritage is nostalgic, retrogressive or blinkered from practicality or from such significant contemporary concerns as sustainability and the climate.  Sometimes I think that it is hard-striven, exclusive, fashionable modernism that is myopic.

Peter Watts, former Director of the Historic Houses Trust writes that

...Dr Broadbent is not just an academic.  When not advising on the conservation of early houses - and their interiors and gardens - he can be found working on his own c1810, The Cottage, at Mulgoa in NSW, which he saved from dereliction and around which he has used the bones of an old garden to create an exceptionally fine garden that responds to its time and place with perfection...