The reader meets the subjects in chronological order, from Gertrude Bell, who began her elaborate, English-style garden in Queensland’s Coochin Coochin in 1883, to Judith Wright, who planted Australian indigenous plants wherever she lived, in the last half of the twentieth century.

Another Queenslander, Eva Kirk, moved to Esk with her husband in 1903 and corresponded with her favourite aunt for twenty years. The resulting correspondence illustrates how gardening networks cemented social relationships. The letters remind us that for these women there was no local plant nursery; the only way to make their gardens more diverse was by sharing cuttings and by posting each other seeds in the envelopes with their accompanying letters.

In 1954, Ann Tully’s entertaining article ‘My Outback Garden’ was published in Australian Home Beautiful. Like Bell, Ann Tully had a European vision, which she had to adapt to the Queensland environment, discovering, for example, that roses do not fare well on bore water.

For Mildred Hood, a working-class Tasmanian woman, aged eighteen in 1908, a garden was a means to an end. Hood wanted to cultivate a market garden so that she could make money to study medicine. In her diary excerpts, we read that her plans were continually thwarted by circumstances. She rails against the injustice of her lot, decrying the demands of an unfair society, contrasting her own heavy obligations with those of her luckier brother. We get a visceral sense of the constrictions of life on the land, especially for one who longed for broader horizons and whose family did not have the financial resources or domestic help of well-to-do women such as Bell. Mildred’s diary is a rare document: ‘Very few women of her class and education have left us words which speak so eloquently of their ambitions and the frustrations they faced in trying to realise them.’

Victorian writer and naturalist Jean Galbraith’s first garden article appeared in 1925, her last newspaper column in 1992. Galbraith’s books include Wildflowers in Victoria (1950) and Field Guide to the Wildflowers of South-East Australia (1977). Her long correspondence with John Inglis Lothian was begun and sustained by their mutual love of gardens. There was a large age gap, but they were kindred spirits. ‘Through her letters, this sheltered, sensitive young woman began to explore the joy inherent in a meeting of like minds. Here was a relationship offering comfort, security and love, and which evades conventional classification.’

When P.R. (‘Inky’) Stephenson, a fervent promoter of Australian literature, was interned during World War II for three and a half years, letters were the main form of communication between him and his common-law wife, Winifred. Through her letters, describing the progress of their garden at Heathcote, Winifred ‘would recreate a world Inky knew, and through her detailed descriptions of their garden she would draw Inky into her world and their shared history’. Inky was permitted to write two letters per week. Their letters were censored; it was inhibiting, knowing that strangers would be reading about their thoughts and feelings. A degree of self-censorship was inevitable, but writing about their (predominantly native) garden was safely non-political and impersonal. Holmes points out the poignancy in this situation, however, since the letters ‘need to convey meanings beyond their words’.

Intensely idealistic and hard-working, Katharine Susannah Prichard was a communist, a campaigner for peace and nuclear disarmament, and winner of the World Peace Council medal in 1959. She wrote about her garden in her novels and letters. Prichard had a tragic life, with the loss of many of those whom she loved. It is poignant to read of her joy at one early stage (‘I didn’t think happiness could ever happen to me, the Furies had chased me so far and hard’) when one knows that the tragedies were not over for her yet.

For poet and activist Judith Wright, the land was her passion and inspiration. Her lifelong friendship with wildflower illustrator Kathleen McArthur, and the garden and letters which nurtured it, contributed to Wright’s development as a poet and to McArthur’s artistic eye. In their correspondence they translated ‘the daily tasks of digging, weeding and watering into words which sing on the page’.

Throughout these stories of individuals, Holmes interweaves the historical context of those lives in a compelling discourse about class, gender, and personal and national identity. This book implicitly challenges an understanding of history that privileges public stories and grand narratives about the past. Between the Leaves gives us intimate understandings of women’s lives, but also delves into broader questions about how Australia was, and continues to be, settled. Katie Holmes has given us a fascinating book that raises universal themes such as hope, loss, friendship, creativity, and identity, as well as addressing the urgent contemporary question: how do we live and garden in a changing climate?