Sometimes a coffee table book can save the world – or at the very least a garden.
Wendy Whiteley’s mission to protect in perpetuity her so-called “secret garden” – the lushly planted patch of land she had tended for two decades below her house in Sydney’s Lavender Bay – looks set for a happy ending.
The widow of artist Brett Whiteley learned on Friday that North Sydney council’s lease on the land, which is owned by RailCorp, has been extended by 30 years, with an additional 30 years roll-over clause.
The announcement by Andrew Constance, New South Wales transport and infrastructure minister, and MP Jillian Skinner, came after a month of renewed publicity surrounding the garden’s future, prompted by a new book, Wendy Whiteley and the Secret Garden, by journalist Janet Hawley.
The weighty volume recounts how Whiteley – grief-stricken after her ex-husband’s drugs overdose and the death of their daughter Arkie from cancer – transformed the Lavender Bay site from landfill to urban oasis.
Whiteley has never owned the garden, which is ungated and open to the public 365 days a year, but privately funded its development, including two full-time gardeners.
In a recent interview with Guardian Australia, she revealed her fears for its fate: “I worry when I’m gone what’s going to happen to it all. I don’t believe in an afterlife ... but it will be very sad for everyone else if the garden is lost.”
At Friday’s announcement, Andrew Constance said: “Wendy has poured her blood, sweat and tears into the garden and she, along with the people of Sydney, deserve certainty that it will be here for years to come. Our announcement today ends the question mark over the garden’s future.”
A delighted Whiteley told reporters: “I can’t quite grasp it yet. It’s still a bit unreal.
“It will become a collaboration now, instead of there being the slightly worrying feeling that somebody could arrive with a bulldozer one day, or a chainsaw or something, and it would all be gone overnight.”
