Edna Walling

[citation needed] With the encouragement of her mother, Walling was awarded her government certificate in horticulture at Burnley College in December 1917, and after some years as a jobbing gardener she commenced her own landscape design practice in the 1920s.

[2] In the 1920s, as Australia's first woman land developer, Walling began to create a village at Mooroolbark on the outskirts of Melbourne called Bickleigh Vale.

[6] Their best collaboration was seen in a free-form swimming pool and outcrop, built in 1939-40 for Edith Hughes-Jones at Olinda, Victoria Her design practice grew and she worked across Australia, in Perth, Hobart, Sydney, and Buderim in Queensland.

[12] Walling's expertise as an artist enabled her to produce watercolour plans to convey to clients the ambience of the finished gardens she intended to create.

[15] Despite her ill-health during her last years at Bendle, Walling continued to write prolifically, rewriting manuscripts, corresponding to newspapers on environmental issues, and trying to republish her books.

She was the author of several books on landscape design, and she and garden writer and botanist Jean Galbraith enjoyed a long correspondence, generating materials for an unpublished manuscript 'The Harvest of a Quiet Eye'.

[32][33] Though she had long working association with Eric Hammond and Ellis Stone, her succession of female assistants and close relationships with women including Esmé Johnston[34] and poet Lorna Fielden[35] and friendships with other women who lived openly in a partnership, like bookshop owner Margareta Webber with Dr Jean Littlejohn, and landscape architect Mervyn Davis (her name was Welsh) and Daphne Pearson, have led some researchers to the conclusion that she was lesbian, though Walling herself, who lived through Australia's more conservative, homophobic cultural period,[36] made no such admission.

A design commission prompted her move to Bendles in Buderim in Queensland 1967, where she was later joined by her companion Lorna Fielden, who had been a teacher at MLC and also edited Walling's writings.