Eagle-eyed visitors to the northern reaches of Boroondara may have noticed a couple of street name patterns near Doncaster Road and Greythorn Road.

There are two areas with related names here.

The first is a group of three streets running west off Greythorn Road that have a fruit theme: Lemon Road, Lime Avenue and Citron Grove. The second is two streets running north off Doncaster Road with a nut theme: Walnut Road and Almond Street.

So why are they named in this way?

For long parts of their modern history, agriculture was the primary industry of large sections of Camberwell, Kew and Balwyn. You can see this reflected in the crest of the City of Camberwell which contains a lot of farming iconography.

Because Balwyn and North Balwyn were some of the last areas to be developed in Boroondara, they retained agricultural land right up until the 1950s and 60s. This was when the post-war suburban sprawl finally engulfed the area with residential development.

There were some small pockets of farms on the tops of hills and along ridge roads like Belmore Road and Doncaster Road. Lowlands near creeks and rivers were also used for livestock and plants. You can see the land use patterns in this 1945 aerial imagery.

In fact, Balwyn had some of the very first apple farms ever established in Melbourne and the very name of Balwyn (from Welsh, meaning ‘home of the vine’) reflects its early status as an important wine-producing area. The Greythorn area of North Balwyn was also particularly known for its citrus orchards.

Short of digging through hundreds of pages of rates books from the 1800s, there seems to be precious little information on exactly where these farms were located.

While most can be seen in the 1945 aerial photographs, there were many more along Belmore Road and near the creeks in particular before the turn of the 20th Century. Maybe that will be for another post!