The articles in this special issue on Australasian gardens and landscapes examine the fraught and challenging processes of perception, and of settling and making new gardens and landscapes. The issue focuses on the period of European colonization, marked in Australia by the settlement at Botany Bay in 1788 and in New Zealand from its formal colonization in 1840 through the Treaty of Waitangi, signed between the indigenous Maori and the British Crown. The articles move chronologically through this 220-year period to explore the different garden making and landscapes evident in this period.