Dennarque, Tolimount Cottage, Withycombe, Pirramimma, Mount Wilson garden estates, NSW Blue Mountains
The NSW Blue Mountains village of Mount Wilson has become a magnet for Instagrammers – not least for its spectacular garden estates.
In the early 2000s, former Macquarie Group banker Bill Moss and his wife Lata explored the countryside from the NSW Central Coast to Tasmania, looking for a weekender. They were thinking about Bowral when a friend suggested the Blue Mountains, saying: “What about Dennarque? It’s the best property up there.”
The Sydney-based agent who had the listing at the time hadn’t been keen on driving to an off-the-beaten-track part of the Blue Mountains, but Moss says “We opened the gate, and within five metres, I looked down the driveway and said, ‘I’m going to buy this place’.”
That was 2003, and the couple secured Dennarque, the Mount Wilson estate they hope will remain in family hands for decades to come.
The unrenovated sandstone mansion had been built in 1876 to a design by Ferdinand Reuss Jr for the wealthy public servant Edward Merewether, who lived there with his wife, Augusta, and their 10 children. The Mosses started to restore the home and next tackled the gardens, originally only a vegetable patch and orchard before Charles Moore, director of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden designed Dennarque’s first grand gardens in the 1880s.
In a self-published book just back from the printer, covering the four seasons of the estate and produced partly for their young grandchildren, the couple write about “towering tree ferns proudly showing their age – some a few hundred years old – a large variety of Japanese maples, cherry blossoms and other fruiting trees, very old eucalyptus, chestnut and walnut trees, immense Himalayan pine trees, and a recently established oriental garden with a Japanese teahouse overlooking a koi lake”. Some of the property’s eucalypts are thought to be 400 years old. “A leisurely stroll in the garden can take more than two hours,” Bill Moss says.
Taking its Aboriginal name from one of its tree ferns, Dennarque once covered 20ha, before land was carved off in the years after the Depression. The couple have added two holdings, including Koonawarra – now surrounded by Japanese gardens – taking the estate back to nearly half its original size. When asked if Dennarque is an investment, he replies: “Its a folly.” One that takes three gardeners to maintain, and where the couple have weathered all that nature could throw at the mountain top. “We’ve had bushfires, we had cyclones, windstorms, droughts and had to buy water, fatal diseases that destroyed some of the old trees. We’ve had all sorts of things, but we keep going.”
Down the road in Mount Wilson is another grand garden estate, Withycombe. “Withycombe found us,” said landscape designer Barbara Landsberg after she bought it in 2002.
The 3ha estate comes with a homestead built in the 1870s for the Cox family of explorers. Ruth and Victor White, parents of the Nobel Prize winning novelist Patrick White, bought it in 1921 and called it Withycombe, Ruth’s maiden name. They sold it to the Church of England as a residence for its archbishop. Helen and Gary Ghent bought the estate in 1981 and held on to it for two decades, before selling it to Landsberg and her husband Merrick Howes for a then record $2.05 million.
Landsberg first came across the estate in the late 1980s while on a weekend away with friends, relatives of the Ghents, who were visiting from the UK. “I remember looking at the house as we drove through the entrance gates and thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Who owns something like this?’” Landsberg recalled on the planthunter blog.
When she married Howes, the couple’s wedding present from the Ghents, to whom they’d become close, was a week’s stay at the property. “It became a sanctuary and a very special place for us well before we had any idea we would own it,” she said.
In 2001, the Ghents phoned and said they were ready to sell. “And there we were,” says Landsberg. She then got to work on the overgrown garden on a basalt-capped peak on the northern edge of the Blue Mountains, about 1000m above sea level. The formal front lawn, dominated by a Spanish oak tree, and the old tennis court overhung by other oaks are the only parts of the garden that have stayed relatively unchanged in the past 150 years. Landsberg’s parents, Joe and Diana Landsberg, took on the role of the estate’s resident managers.
Sales in Mount Wilson have been rare, but it seems a generational change is occurring among the 80 homes listed on the map in the village centre. The most recent sale was Bisley, with its 4ha of English-inspired gardens. It was sold by Graham and Beverly Thompson to an Otford couple who will upgrade from their small weekender in the Blue Mountains.
The Thompsons spent many months overseas researching gardens, even enrolling at Oxford. “It was their absolute passion,” Iris Property selling agent Martin Schoeddert says, noting that the couple’s first major plantings commenced in 1984. “Showing remarkable depth of insight into garden planning and a no-expense-spared approach to its execution, they transformed the thorn-covered paddock into one of NSW’s premier properties with more than 30 years of love and toil,” he says.
Schoeddert recently listed Tolimount Cottage, with $2.4 million to $2.7 million hopes. The almost 3ha property last sold for $1.35 million in 2004 when an English family bought it from the late interior decorator Tom Harding and his wife Liz. One of its most prominent features is its semi-circle of dogwoods.
There are nine other listings in Mount Wilson, which is 125 km west of Sydney. The village is surrounded by bush and has no shops or cafes, just a little timber church, but on weekends the streets are lined with Instagrammers visiting open gardens. There’s also Richard Wynne’s Turkish bathhouse-cum-museum, opened in 1997 by the then chair of the NSW Heritage Council, Hazel Hawke. It is run by the Mount Wilson Historical Society, which celebrated the 150th anniversary of the village’s surveying at Dennarque last November.
The recent four seasons of the Dennarque estate have been photographed by Evan Wang, with shoots directed by Nadine Bush, for the Mosses’ book. Bill’s father was a gardener and Bill fondly recalls his own time at James Ruse Agricultural High School. Lata learned about kitchen gardening at her school, where it was part of the curriculum.
Jamie Durie writes in the book that it takes “immense patience, discipline and barrow-loads of tenacity to create a garden with a deep sense of establishment. Dennarque’s deep history has been maintained by its honourable custodians, who have both nurtured and controlled its fascinating and intricate growth.
“As a horticulturist I can view this garden through professional eyes, and what I have witnessed over the 10 years I have known her is nothing short of botanic brilliance and horticultural heroics. Children find enchantment, couples hold hands, and the elderly sit in wonder. It never ceases to amaze me how much joy a garden can really bring to one’s soul. Dennarque and its multiple garden rooms brings this joy in spades.”
Landscape gardener Michael Bates has a weekender at nearby Mount Irvine, which he says has historically been the cheaper property market where gardening staff for the Mount Wilson estates came from. He says he’s probably halfway through a three-decade commitment: “It’s like having a family, but time flies.”
Pirramimma is one of Bates’s professional Blue Mountain accomplishments – a mix of contemporary and heritage plantings on 10ha at Wentworth Falls that involved a collaboration with landscaper Craig Burton and architect Peter Stutchbury. Bates says the garden – established more than 30 years ago by nursery owners John and Jill Gaibor and entertainer Reg Livermore – respects its layered history. It was built on the remnants of an orchard belonging to the former Toll Hotel. According to Bates, Burton had a magical set of goggles that allowed him to read the landscape – an ability to know what to strip away, what to keep and how to reshape the ground.
With a limited turnover in the prestige Blue Mountains, the residential price record remains the 2008 sale of Carramar at Wentworth Falls. The 1900 weatherboard and slate-roofed house on a 6070sq m escarpment position was sold for $3.3 million through Christie’s Great Estates and Downer & Maher Real Estate. The period home sits in gardens designed by Paul Sorensen and features cold climate exotics and towering redwoods.