Wendy Whiteley’s green oasis in Lavender Bay is safe for the moment, but will it one day be swallowed by the burgeoning concrete spread on the North Shore?
Wendy’s Secret Garden in Lavender Bay has been a peaceful green space overlooking Sydney Harbour for over 25 years since Wendy Whiteley threw herself into the project in the mid-1990s.
Wendy Whiteley has lived in Lavender Bay since moving in with husband, renowned Australian artist Brett Whiteley, in 1970. Following Brett’s death in 1992, she threw herself into tidying up the land in front of her house, and with even more intensity after her daughter Arkie died in 2001.
The mix of private and public land in front of Wendy’s house stretches towards the old railway line that operated from 1893 until 1924.
“It was just this big green lump in front of us that had been there forever,” Wendy tells North Shore Living. “I just started at one end and kept going. You couldn’t tell what was there until you started clearing up the mess. All the weeds and all the rubbish had to come out first.”
“The reason I started it was that the top part, Clark Park, a North Sydney Council park, was getting so full of people desperate for a bit of grass,” Wendy says. “The whole of the Milsons Point side of Lavender Bay is already overbuilt with residencies, and those people need a bit of green space.”
The state still owns the land, but in 2015, then Premier Mike Baird set up a 30-year lease with a 30-year rollover clause with North Sydney Council. Wendy hopes the state land will be turned over to the council when the clause expires.
But with North Sydney developments increasing and a recently-imposed state target of 75,000 new homes a year, Wendy is anxious about the area’s green space.
Wendy says councils continuously run out of funding, with overruns like the North Sydney Olympic Pool project, and neglect green space. A plaza takes less maintenance.
“Developers offset a huge tall building with a bit of a public plaza,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll have a green roof and a bit of a plaza with some trees. That’ll be lovely for everybody to sit down in’. The fact is it’s not particularly comfortable sitting on a bit of hot concrete.”
“And they keep calling any green space ‘passive recreation’,” she adds. “To walk through nature is not a passive activity. The word ‘passive’ makes people think of something as dead and therefore unimportant,” she adds.
“I don’t think we can afford to lose one inch more of green space, which absolutely includes the garden.”
Although she has a team of volunteers who work once a month, the garden needs two full-time gardeners. She’s afraid to add up the maintenance costs.
“I’ve been doing it for 25 years, and I think I might be horrified at the amount of money I’ve actually spent,” she laughs.
Wendy recently attended her first council meeting in thirty years to speak on a motion, recommended by council staff, to make donations to the Wendy Whiteley Secret Garden Trust tax deductible.
Wendy believes this will encourage extra donations which will help with the cost of maintaining what she says is not a ‘mow and blow’ garden.
“I’m getting a bit tired of paying for everything in the garden,” Wendy says. “It’s only recently that I have started to get help from the council, for which I’m very grateful.”
Wendy says she’d like to be able to do more in the garden herself, but sometimes her knees won’t allow it.
“I’m 83,” she states. “I’m not going to be around that much longer. But (the garden) needs looking after. Everything needs looking after.”