SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Gardens now a luxury

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32972, 19 July 1972, Page 7

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Gardens now a luxury

“When we bought it, nobody wanted water frontage land, and we got it for a song. It was war time, everybody was talking about Japanese landings and taking to the Blue Mountains. They thought we were mad. That was 30 years ago . .

Mrs Arthur Davis, better known among gardeners as Margaret Davis, was talking about slightly less than half an acre of land that dips steeply to Long Bay from Cowdry Avenue in Cammeray. If you follow Long Bay out past Folly Point and Salt Pan Creek, Fig Tree Point, Quaker’s Head, and Beauty Point you come to the waters of Middle Harbour just above the Spit Bridge. But coming by road through the fairly thickly populated suburbs just north

of the Harbour Bridge, Cammeray is only four miles from the General Post Office. That, and a water frontage, makes land in Sydney pretty valuable these days—and property throughout the city is being officially revalued and re-assessed. BEST-KNOWN GARDEN As a result, Mr and Mrs Davis have rather sadly decided that they can no longer afford the almost $3OOO a year it was going to cost them to maintain their land.

So Sydney’s best-known garden will be sliced in two. Mr and Mrs Davis will keep slightly more than a third, a long strip from the road to the water, and build a new, smaller house on it. The other piece with the old house will be put up for sale.

Whoever buys it will get a pretty big share of a garden that is probably the best in Sydney, although Mrs Davis herself is modest about that. It could not compete, she says, with some others and certainly not with the ones round Melbourne, out in the Dandenong Ranges or at Mount Macedon, for instance.

All the same it is a garden that has been photographed, written about, much admired, and much visited. The visitors come every year, through the year. “It was a novelty when Japanese gardens were only beginning to be introduced,” says Mrs Davis. “We put some unusual things in it, and so it became quite well known. VISITING GARDENERS “We get a lot of visiting gardeners. Many garden clubs come, for instance, from North America. We had one last year—they went on to New Zealand—and they enjoyed their tour so much they are coming again next year. We get parties from Britain, visitors from conventions and things, nothing to do with gardens, who like to visit the garden while they are here. There is almost always someone. “Yes, a lot of New Zealanders — from Tauranga, for instance. That’s a great area for gardening, and we

have this interesting affiliation with them.”

Mrs Davis is founder president of the Garden Club of Australia, a federation of 40 clubs mostly up and down the east coast, in Barwin, Brisbane, Canberra, Victoria, although mostly in New South Wales.

As well, she has written two books on gardening, “A Garden in Pots” and “Living Flower Arrangements.” “That one doesn’t sound as if it has much to do with gardening, but it’s really about arrangements with growing things,” she said. And she has done what she describes as “a lot of overseas pottering about” connected with garden clubs and gardens. LAND TAX “INIQUITOUS” Several week-ends a year, the garden has been opened in support of various charities. Many Sydney people have got to know it well over the last quarter of a century. “I always thought that was a good way to help all the causes we wanted to help — and I resent being deprived of that ability,” says Mrs Davis. “But this iniquitious land tax is making it just impossible to go on maintaining it.” The land tax is $l6OO a year. Rates are $BOO, and

the water rate, $490. It averages about $55 a week. “Most people round here in valuable places have sold. We held on because we thought we could carry on. But it’s quite impossible. “We are making a protest and a bit of fuss about it but it’s too late to save it now.” In fact, rocks are already being uprooted and some trees coming down on the block the Davises intend to keep. “But it might help someone else. I’m afraid that soon there won’t be any gardens in Sydney, at least nothing more than the size of a pocket handkerchief.” The old house and the larger piece of the garden will go on the market as soon as the new house is well under way. JOINT VENTURE?

“If no-one buys, we shall have to put it up for auction and take a chance.” But Mrs Davis is hoping that someone will buy and care enough about it to keep the land as a garden and not cut it up. If that happened, Mrs Davis says, they might be able to get together to open the whole place for viewing again, as in the past. "We’ve had a lot of letters and telephone calls from people saying how sorry