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180 DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE // CULTURAL LANDSCAPE REPORT raise public awareness of special areas and to create an interest in their conservation.” 44 Griffin’s conservation ideals and his idealized design inspiration from nature were shaped by his own childhood and his witness to the urbanization of the industrial revolution. Griffin scholar Christopher Vernon writes: Griffin witnessed this abrupt metamorphosis, later reflecting on the loss: ‘When I was a child there was plenty of open ground to play in, about ten allotments to each boy… Now’, he continued, ‘it is ten boys to each allotment’. The emphasis placed on nature must therefore also be seen as Griffin’s impassioned response to this condition of modernity. The rapidity with which the seemingly permanent – the open landscape – was consumed, stimulated not only a design interest in permanency but also emphasised the need to connect with or to humanize nature. Griffin’s design, which themselves were instruments of suburbanisation, became Arcadian venues for this reconnection. 45 Griffin’s design of the Martin House gardens, and perhaps just as importantly, the relationship that Darwin Martin had with the designed landscape as expressed in his sentimentality toward the idyllic countryside of his youth, is accurately described by Christopher Vernon’s portrayal of 44 Christopher Vernon, ‘A legitimate art distinctive of Australia and Australia alone’: The Griffins’ contribution to the formation of an Australian landscape design ethos, 4. 45 Ibid., 4. Griffin’s design interest – an Arcadian venue for Martin’s reconnection with nature. In essence, Darwin Martin, also shaped by Transcendentalist writings, was the perfect client for both Wright and Griffin’s emerging design philosophies. A handful of years after Griffin had won the Canberra competition and left America for Australia, it was noted landscape writer and Country Life in America editor Wilhelm Miller who credited Griffin as being among the select few practitioners – with Jens Jensen and O.C. Simonds – to have stylistically established what he called The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening. Miller’s publication of the same name was distributed in 1915 and is now considered “a significant early example of ecological writing” and “the historic expression of an emerging conservation ethic.” 46 Miller’s Prairie Spirit, which was provided free to any land owner who would sign a pledge to perform some of the recommended practices, advocated the use of native plants and the appreciation, conservation and restoration of the native mid- west landscape. 47 Miller identified Jensen, Simmonds and Griffin as having evolved the style, noting within its opening paragraph that it was “founded on the fact that one of the greatest assets which any country or natural part of it can have, is a strong national or regional character, 46 Robin Karson, preface to Wilhelm Miller’s The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening, ASLA Centennial Reprint Series, Amherst and Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 47 Miller also expected that the tenets of his Prairie Spirit, namely conservation, restoration, appreciation of native beauty, could be replicated in other geographic ecologies throughout the nation. Figs. 177 Walter Burley Griffin.