Olive Fitzhardinge

Olive Fitzhardinge (1881–1956) was an Australian rose breeder, the first to patent her work. Her four surviving roses are held in Australian collections. Her roses were well received in the 1930s but after the Second World War favoured styles of roses changed significantly.

Olive Rose McMaster was born in 1881 at Warialda, northern New South Wales. She was brought up in the country at Moree. She was the elder daughter of Colin James McMaster (1853–1930) and Sarah Ross (1855–1927). Her father was for twenty years Chief Commissioner and chairman of the Western Lands Board, which administered land leases in the whole western third of NSW.

Olive was educated by a governess at home and boarded 1897–1898 at Presbyterian Ladies College, Croydon.

She and her sister Dorothy Jean (1884–1966), later Mrs C.W.D. Conacher of Crona, Warrawee, were influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, and through it Victorian Medievalism. They collected medieval objects, dress fabrics and tapestry. They cultivated quiet Country Life interiors furnished with old things and lit with tallow candles in medieval candlesticks. Exteriors would show the luxuriant infomality of Gertrude Jekyll's Roses for English Gardens. Later Olive was to breed roses to look well in candlelight. Her second daughter was married in a "mediaeval gown".

It lent depth to Olive's interest that she married into a pre-Conquest, west of England family ennobled by Henry II in the twelfth century. In 1909 she married Dr Hardinge Clarence Fitzhardinge (1878–1958), a Macquarie Street dental surgeon. He was the son of M.A.H. Fitzhardinge, a prominent Sydney solicitor from the second generation of the well-known NSW legal family founded in the 1840s by W.G.A. Fitzhardinge.

Hardinge and Olive lived at Cremorne Point for some years but in 1917 bought 1.5 acres (0.61 ha) with a northerly aspect and good volcanic soil at Warrawee 21 km northwest of Sydney. As all North Shore suburbs with aboriginal names, Warrawee was the name of a railway station which became attached to the surrounding suburb. Warrawee had developed in the 1900s as an exclusive residential district with no shops, offices, post office, public school, churches or through roads. All the blocks were kept to between one and four acres and the form of houses tightly controlled. The Fitzhardinges had Bridge End at No. 1 Warrawee Avenue, where they built a spreading single-storey house and established "quite a famous garden". As well-to-do citizens of the Empire they followed London manners and taste: in a world of "lounge" rooms they kept to a drawing-room.

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