Jocelyn Brown

(Doris) Jocelyn Brown born Doris Jocelyn Giles (1898 – 1971) was an Australian writer, landscape gardener and artist.

Life Brown was born in 1898 in the Brisbane suburb of Toowong. Her mother, Georginia Munro Hull, was an Australian and her father, Sydney Reynolds Giles, had been born in England. She was engaged in 1915 to Alfred John Brown who was from New Zealand, but he was then training in Sydney. In 1920 she married her fiance who was then employed as an assistant architect in England. They stayed in England during the 1920s and they were both inspired by the new town of Welwyn Garden City. She was working as a commercial artist, but she was a serial garden designer and throughout the 1930s and during the war years she built a number of gardens for herself in different suburbs of Sydney. Her designs were for suburban residences where neo-Tudor was the fashion. She was a fan of arts and crafts follower Gertrude Jekyll, who saw the garden and the house as complementary designs. Brown's designs would feature rockeries, mixed borders and vistas away from the house with silver foliage and classis Edwardian flowering plants near the home. She was not a fan of native species although they were included if not featured.

Her Sydney gardens at Killara and her writing brought in commissions including St. Aubin's House at Scone in 1940. She also lectured at the University of Sydney about landscape design. Brown died in Camden in 1971. Her husband survived her by five years and he had an unsuccessful second marriage. Helen Proudfoot wrote her biography, Gardens in Bloom: Jocelyn Brown and Her Sydney Gardens of the '30s and '40s, and this was published in 1989.