Macdonald named his purchase Mount Adelaide and spent considerable amounts of money on it, although no residence had been built by the time he put it up for sale in 1837.
His father was Principal Gardener to the Earl of Crawford and Lindesay at his property Struthers, where the young Thomas received his earliest horticultural education.
Widowed (c. 1821–22) and then remarried (1823) and faced with an unprofitable landscape and nursery business in the period after 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, he took a position with the New Zealand company.
[1] With a band of colonists, mainly Scots, he sailed in 1825 with his new wife Jane Sarah (née Henderson) and young family for the South Pacific.
With encouragement from Governor Darling, he established the first commercial nursery garden in Australia near Grose Farm (1827) (today's suburb of Chippendale/Darlington, and adjacent to what is now the University of Sydney and Victoria Park).
This was gradually expanded into the Darling Nursery with help of stock from Sydney Botanic Gardens, as well as from Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay at Elizabeth Bay House and his son William Macarthur at Camden Park.
Little is known of his landscaping work but, having established himself in the colony, Shepherd gave two sets of lectures at Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts during 1834–35, for which (in their published form) he is now chiefly remembered.
Shepherd's "Lectures on the Horticulture of New South Wales" (1835) addressed practical matters, such as the growing of vegetables in a colony with a different climate and soils to those of Britain and complete turnabout of the seasons.
At first sight conservative in their aesthetics, the lectures drew rhetorically on the Brownian tradition of the English landscape garden, albeit tempered by local circumstance and contemporary thought.
Shepherd deplored the indiscriminate destruction of timber and instead advocated selective thinning and tasteful arrangement and disposition of exotic trees to create "pleasing effects (and) ...improved scenery".
His advice on education for young gardeners had strong overtones of publisher and writer, John Claudius Loudon, and many of the later lectures borrowed from his writings.
[1] William McDonald's Mount Adelaide estate (1833–37) is the only known landscape design that can confidently be attributed to Thomas Shepherd – a terraced vineyard at Double Bay overlooking an ornamental fishpond with Sydney Harbour as a backdrop.
When he purchased it, Samuel had been married to Charlotte (daughter of shipping magnate and later Premier of New South Wales, Sir John See), and he and his wife had three children.
As Samuel Hordern II already enjoyed the benefits of a modern home at Strathfield, it is unlikely that the house was the reason for his purchase of the Mount Adelaide property.
His eldest son, (Sir) Samuel Hordern (1879–1956) acquired Mount Adelaide on the Darling Point ridge and created a vast new residence and landscaped setting in a Federation Arts and Crafts style (c. 1912): formal stairways descended from the porte cochere to sunken gardens and grottoes distinguished by an important botanic collection.
Built on exactly the same spot as the earlier Mount Adelaide and replicating its orientation, the main aspect of the house faced north-east towards Double Bay.
His eldest son, (Sir) Samuel Hordern (1879–1956) acquired Mount Adelaide on the Darling Point ridge and created a vast new residence and landscaped setting in an Arts and Crafts style (c. 1912): formal stairways descended from the porte cochere to sunken gardens and grottoes distinguished by an important botanic collection.
From the onset of his father's last illness in 1906 until 1926 when the company was sold to private investors, Samuel II was the governing director of Anthony Hordern and Sons.
The pasturalist Major Harold de Vahl Rubin purchased Babworth House with the mind for using it as a private hospital and a Remembrance Trust was established.
His eldest son, (Sir) Samuel Hordern (1879–1956), acquired Mount Adelaide on the Darling Point ridge and created a vast new residence and landscaped setting in an Arts and Crafts style (c. 1912): formal stairways descended from the porte cochere to sunken gardens and grottoes distinguished by an important botanic collection.
to give an exuberant and tropical character to parts of the garden; the retention of areas with a strong nineteenth sombreness and richly varies plant list throughout the estate.
The house is two storey with walls finished in finely worked, unpainted, cement render with beautifully detailed Art Nouveau-inspired decorations around openings and chimneys.
A series of very crisp and precise indented lines surround the house, adding strength and balance to the numerous and varied openings, balconies and other architectural elements.
All of these, with the exception of the drawing room, are heavily paneled in English oak and Queensland maple with finely detailed door cases and beamed ceilings.
Walls are paneled in a Classical Revival manner, reminiscent of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with carved door cases and a strongly articulated dado.
Babworth House is an excellent and rare example of the Federation Arts and Crafts style in grand domestic architecture in Australia.
The quality and uniqueness of the exterior and interior detailing, incorporating both Art Nouveau and neoclassical motifs and forms is of a standard and scale rarely seen in domestic architecture.
There is evidence of[1] The place is important in demonstrating aesthetic characteristics and/or a high degree of creative or technical achievement in New South Wales.
The quality and uniqueness of the exterior and interior detailing, incorporating both Art Nouveau and neoclassical motifs and forms is of a standard and scale rarely seen in domestic architecture.
Babworth House is an excellent and rare example of the Federation Arts and Crafts style in grand domestic architecture in Australia.