Barrie Gallacher: The interesting part about the garden design was that the layout was first proposed by the architects for the building, Reed & Barnes, and they proposed for the western forecourt, was based around a circular carriage drive. Now, research into William Sangster and his planting style tells us that he was a disciple of the Victorian Picturesque landscape, and this involved naturalistic or picturesque style landscaping as distinct from geometric and formal gardens.
Now, Sangster himself was quite annoyed that he had to force his landscaping style into a plan that was given to him by architects, where he had to work with circles and straight lines and the article in the Australasian in 1880 was quite clear about this, he was not happy. What it appears that he had done was to use instead of a very formal planting approach, where you’ve got bedding styles such as he actually did in the parterre gardens, that the western forecourt was a much simpler arrangement of a whole mix of plant species and they were just scattered throughout.