Elizabeth Bay House was originally surrounded by a celebrated garden of 21.8 hectares. Landscaped with long terraces, it included a kitchen garden, orchards, shrubbery and flower gardens, picturesque walks and a famed botanical collection of both native and exotic plants.

In 1826, Governor Richard Darling granted the land surrounding Elizabeth Bay to his Colonial Secretary, Alexander Macleay (1767-1848). For 8 years before construction began on Macleay’s marine villa, the rocky hillside was progressively terraced and stepped, and a broad platform was blasted from the cliff on which to construct the house. From here lawns swept out to flowerbeds and then onto stone balustrades, below which were bush walks and a rectangular kitchen garden and orchard. The setting of the house and its outbuildings, and the layout of drives, walks and garden terraces, was carefully planned to maximise the vistas and dramatic topography of the Sydney Harbour site.

The garden conforms to the fashionable Regency style of Humphrey Repton, who called for a close integration of the house with its landscape by the use of terraces, flowerbeds and architectural features. Views were carefully composed in the ‘Picturesque’ style with low, detailed planting in the foreground, a broader shrubbery forming the middle ground, leading to a sweeping harbour background. Macleay used large trees, such as native Araucarias (including the Hoop, Bunya and Norfolk pines), eucalypts and giant bamboos, to define the gardens and frame these views. Large shrubs were arranged in ‘shrubbery walks’, detailed with native orchids and small plants, and the lawns dotted with cape bulbs and surrounded by bedding and balustrades. Details of the garden suggest the ‘Gardenesque’ style of John Claudius Loudon, which emphasized the botanical diversity of the huge numbers of new plant species becoming available to gardeners in the early nineteenth century. Macleay corresponded with Loudon, whose English ‘Gardener’s Magazine’ described features similar to those found in the Macleay gardens at Elizabeth Bay and Brownlow Hill, and whom he had nominated for membership in the Linnaean Society of London.

Macleay did not clear his land of native vegetation, as was often the fate of the existing landscape; rather, he selectively thinned the vegetation, and then interplanted his exotic collection. He “preserved his native trees and shrubs to extend his landscape gardening. From the first commencement he never suffered a tree of any kind to be destroyed, until he saw the distinct necessity of doing so. He…harmonised them [his collection] with native trees” wrote local nurseryman Thomas Shepherd, one of Australia’s first garden writers. Two of Macleay’s surviving notebooks detail many of the specific plants grown at Elizabeth Bay House.

THE FATE OF THE GARDEN

Constructing and planting the garden cost a great deal, and contributed to the financial disaster that in 1845 saw the estate pass to Alexander’s son, William Sharp Macleay. A series of subsequent subdivisions and leaseholds slowly divided the wider estate, though the derived income also led to the gardens reinvigoration under the tenancy of Susan and Sir William John Macleay. The property was sold to George Michaelis in 1911, then in 1927 the final subdivision and sale saw the kitchen wing demolished and the house left as a virtual island, encircled by road. Four lots remained, fortuitously opposite the house, and in 1949 public pressure secured its purchase as a park, on the site of a garden once celebrated worldwide.

THE GROTTO

The most significant fragment of the garden to survive subdivision of the estate and subsequent destruction of the gardens is the Grotto, an artificial cave which provided a cool place to view the harbour and the gardens. Originally a natural overhang, one of several on the estate, the grotto was modified with rusticated sandstone blockwork, then stuccoed and decorated with ornamental niches and shells. The structure was once part of a connected series of features that included an ornamental pond, bridge, terraces and stairs. Views by Conrad Martens and early stereoscope photographs record some of these. 

FEATURES OF THE GROTTO AND OTHER GARDEN FRAGMENTS

The “dwarf stone wall”; only a fragment survives of the ornamental stone walls that once ran along the middle garden terrace, and along the lawn that fronted the house. The design, with elegant scrolled ends and distinctive ‘cushion’ top, is probably by the architect John Verge. John Thompson, writing to John Claudius Loudon in 1839, described the wall: “The most striking effect here is a lawn extending before the house, without a shrub or flower, and terminating in a dwarf stone wall, slightly curved, and with scroll ends, from which there are steps leading top the harbour, the view being confined [framed] on each side by foliage of trees, and below, a thousand hues of trees and shrubs seem to tempt you wander into a garden of delicious shade and coolness.”

 

The Stone Steps have an elegantly curved balustrade and end pier. The treads are heavily worn from over 165 years of use. They curve outwards, taking the eye away from the grotto, which then comes as a surprise – what the Sydney Gazette (May 1831) described as a ‘sylvan coup d’oeil’.

 

The Grotto has a finely carved central niche decorated with classical motifs and bears the date ‘1835’. The roof was once decorated with shells, a few of which can still be seen. Further along this terrace, some other fragments of ornamental stonework survive. A large Hoop Pine (Araucaria cunninghamii) and Kauri Pines (Agathis robusta) likely date to the Macleay period.

 

Retaining wall. More rustic in appearance, this section of terrace wall is decorated with incised spiral flourishes.

TO VISIT THE GROTTO 

The grotto is reached via a public right of way between the flats ‘Eltham’ and ‘Tradewinds’ 100 metres south of Elizabeth Bay House along Onslow Avenue. Please be aware that the steps are steep and heavily worn and may be slippery, and please respect the privacy of local residents.

FURTHER READING

Carlin, S. Elizabeth Bay House, a history and a guide. Glebe NSW, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. 2000

Gilbert, Lionel. Mr McLeay's Elizabeth Bay garden: plants, privilege, and power in Sydney's early scientific community. Canberra, Mulini Press. 2000

Morris, Colleen. Lost gardens of Sydney. Produced in association with an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney 9 August - 30 November 2008.  Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. 2008

Shepherd, Thomas. Lectures on landscape Gardening. Sydney, William McGarvie 1836.

The HHT’s Colonial Plants Database lists the 'Plants received at Elizabeth Bay', from Alexander Macleay's own notebook covering the period 1836-1843, the original of which is held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. See the Colonial Plants Database.