Edward La Trobe Bateman


1816 - 1897

Artist and landscape architect. Born in Lower Wyke, a Moravian community established near Bradford in Yorkshire in the early 18th C., La Trobe Bateman had an inventor father and Moravian mother. His elder brother was the water engineer John La Trobe Bateman (1810-89). He moved to London and became acquainted with the sculptor Thomas Woolner, together with the painters John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He worked as an artist and furniture designer, and contributed to the Fine Arts Court of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The following year, La Trobe Bateman travelled to Australia seeking gold, but seems to have found a successful career as an illustrator, architect and garden designer in Melbourne, and laid out the Botanic Gardens there. He returned to Britain in the 1860s and was appointed landscape gardener at Mount Stuart on Bute. He landscaped his own garden at The Hermitage and was also responsible for the nearby Ascog Hall Fernery & Gardens.

He died at The Hermitage and lies buried in the churchyard of Rothesay High Kirk.


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