Diana Pockley (née Longridge, 1913–2011), gardener, fundraiser and amateur historian, was born in Exeter, Devon, England and completed her secondary education in Brighton. A doctor's daughter, she studied orthoptics at Guy's Hospital in London, where she met Dr Francis John Antill Pockley, the grandson of a distinguished Australian ophthalmologist. They married in Exeter in late August 1939 and left for Sydney just a day before Britain declared war on Germany. After arriving in Sydney, the couple rented a beachfront house in Bay Street, Double Bay, which they later purchased and where Diana exercised her love of and flair for gardening and garden design. Between 1940 and 1949 she had three children; and she spent two years in England immediately after the war, returning to Sydney in 1947. Thereafter, she became increasingly involved in community work and in pursuing her interests in gardening as well as embroidery, music, art, decorative arts, design and books. A fine practitioner of needlework, especially cross-stitch and patchwork, in 1957 she co-founded the New South Wales Embroiderer's Guild, of which she was later patron. In 1964 she established the Garden Committee of the National Trust of Australia (NSW) to raise funds to research, design and maintain the gardens of properties in the Trust's portfolio. Along with friends including Dame Helen Blaxland and Caroline Simpson OAM, Pockley was also involved with the redoubtable Women's Committee of the National Trust in projects including the restoration of Elizabeth Farm and Old Government House at Parramatta, and of Lindesay, an 1834 Gothic Revival harbourside villa at Darling Point and a former home to antiquarian and collector Sir Charles Nicholson, among others. She contributed to publications including the National Trust's Hidden Gardens of Sydney (1977) and Australian Antiques: from First Fleet to Federation (1977). Though she became an Australian citizen in 1949, Pockley largely disavowed her naturalisation and made a point of returning to England every two years to visit gardens and historical sites. The impressive library of books on gardening she established was initially disbursed but reassembled in 1998 and presented by Caroline Simpson to the State Library of New South Wales as the Diana Pockley Horticultural Library. Described by her youngest son, as an 'extremely self-effacing' person who 'shrank from any form of public recognition', Pockley was awarded a National Trust medal for her decades of service to the organisation; and in 2003 she was named an Honorary Life Member – the National Trust's highest honour. Pockley died in 2011, aged 98, in the Double Bay house that had been her home for 72 years. 'She wanted to exit quietly with no funeral fuss and requested that Bach be played, the Nunc Dimittis read, and her ashes returned to Southern England'.
