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Yasmar: a landscape at risk in the inner Sydney suburb of Haberfield

Gina Plate

Gardener, heritage and horticulture consultant, garden maintenance contractor, AGHS Sydney

committee member (June 2020)

1870s image showing house set well back from Parramatta Road within its garden featuring a Norfolk Island

Pine, and Moreton Bay figs still growing each side of the gates. (University of Sydney Macleay Museum)

‘Yasmar’, in Sydney’s Haberfield, is the last remaining nineteenth-century villa estate on

Parramatta Road. Its garden contains a trove of rare significant trees and other interesting plants.

It is a place of sanctuary and calm, appreciated by garden history lovers and locals alike. Yasmar’s

garden has associations with people significant in nineteenth-century horticulture and natural

history, who influenced early Sydney’s cultural development.

Yasmar’s heritage value is recognised in national, state and local registers. However, since it came

under the management of State government bodies in 1940, both the house and the garden have

deteriorated. Today the garden is in such poor condition that AGHS’s Sydney Branch considers it

to be a ‘landscape at risk’. Recently the removal of 40 metres of garden frontage to construct the

contested WestConnex motorway was stopped by huge public protest.

Since 2018, a dedicated band of local Haberfield Association volunteers, led by Gina Plate (as

AGHS representative), has made huge progress removing weeds under Crown Lands – the current

owner’s licence. It is hoped that by improving the garden’s look and activating it with events such

as 2019’s Heritage Month Open Day, the garden will enter a new and different phase as a much-

needed local and regional open space with unique heritage values.

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It is planned that those attending the Australian Garden History Society’s annual conference in

October will visit Yasmar’s garden.

1856 Map showing original 480-grant and Dobroyd House, the Ramsay family home, David’s garden & orangery, nursery and Plough Inn. Cserhalmi, Otto & Partners 1994, reproduced in Yasmar House and Garden 2003 Conservation Management Plan

This current map shows the 6 acres remaining of the 44-acre Estate on Parramatta Road.

In its 170-year history, Yasmar has had only three owners: Mary Learmonth (née Ramsay) and

her husband Alexander, the Graces family and the state.

The Ramsay Family The house and garden were built in 1850s on a portion of the 480‒acre Dobroyde Estate, a land

grant given in 1825 as a wedding present to Dr David Ramsay and his wife Sarah Lord, by her

father Simeon, a wealthy emancipist, businessman and large property owner. This estate is the

area that now forms the ‘garden suburb’ of Haberfield.

David Ramsay, who was keenly interested in natural history, retained much of the property’s

virgin bushland but also developed Lord’s farm and a ‘most productive garden containing some

of the finest fruit trees in the colony’, noting in correspondence that its ‘oranges are worth 100

pounds per year’. According to Baron Charles von Hügel, the internationally celebrated Austrian

botanist who visited in 1833–34, the ‘splendid’ garden was ‘famous in the colony … in which were

many rare plants’ and ‘borders surrounding the paddocks’. Among other notable visitors were

Helena and Harriette Scott, accomplished natural flora and fauna artists, daughters of Australian

Museum Trustee Walker Scott. At Dobroyde, they did many of their exquisite paintings depicting

moths at each life cycle stage with examples of flora they fed on. In 1826, David established

Dobroyde Gardens Plant Nursery on Long Creek (now Hawthorne Canal).

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Edward Pierson Ramsay Ramsay’s third-youngest son of ten children, Edward Pierson, was also interested in the natural

sciences, particularly botany and horticulture. He became a member of many related societies in

London, Ireland, Scotland and Sydney and was curator of the Australian Museum for 20 years.

Having inherited the nursery, he renamed it Dobroyde New Seeds and Plants Nursery. Here he

introduced, propagated and sold newly discovered species from Queensland (where he owned a

sugar plantation with two brothers), as well as plants imported from around the world. It is

thought that many rare plants in Yasmar’s garden were supplied by Edward’s nursery.

Mary Louisa Ramsay: Yasmar’s first and most notable owner In 1850, when David and Sarah’s daughter Mary Louisa Ramsay married businessman Alexander

Learmonth, her father gave them a 44‒acre plot as part of her inheritance. There, set well back

from dusty Parramatta Road, they built a single-storey symmetrical sandstone block villa with a

slate roof and terracotta ridge. Yasmar (Ramsay spelt backwards) was designed by John Bibb,

who was working for renowned colonial architect John Verge. The house was described at the

time as ‘a verandahed cottage in the vernacular style, of some architectural sophistication, the

planning and detailing of which is influenced by the [neo-classical] Greek revival style’. Today its

proportions are still pleasing.

*

The villa 2016 (photo Gina Plate) Villa from driveway teardrop bed 2019 (photo Gina Plate)

Subsequent ownership: 1904—2020 Between 1904 and 1949, Yasmar was owned by Joseph Neal Grace (one of the Grace Brothers

department store owners) and wife Sarah Selina ‘Gypsy’ Smith. Many trees survive from the

previous Ramsay-Learmonth’s time, indicating that the Graces managed the garden well.

During the Second World War Yasmar was commandeered for use by the Army, beginning the

property’s third period of ownership – by government – the Army and subsequently the NSW

juvenile justice system. The house became a children’s court for a time, then custodial and

educational facilities were built on its paddocks and enclosed by high prison walls that remain

today. In 2005 the property was transferred to the then NSW Department of Lands and is today

designated a Crown Reserve.

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Surviving front gates on Parramatta Road (photo Gina Plate 2016)

The Garden The garden Mary and Alexander created is in the long strip of land in front of the house, on either

side of the curving driveway that stretches to the iron palisade front gates. Photographs by the

aerial photographer Milton Kent taken in the late 1920s or 1930s show the central garden was

flanked either side by tree-edged (horse and dairy cow?) paddocks. The square kitchen garden, in

a cleared area near the house, can also be seen in the image centre.

Aerial photo (Grace era 1928-1938) showing the house and garden with rear service wings, stables below the house and Haberfield Public School bottom centre, and the garden with many mature trees. Note paddocks and nursery plots to the rear. The school was built on Yasmar land resumed in 1905, 1926, 1944 (photo Milton Kent, Mitchell Library, State Library NSW)

The approach was through Italianate sandstone gateposts with Gothic recesses, each topped with

a sandstone ball motif. The inscriptions ‘Yasmar 183’ and ‘Yasmar 185’ are painted in black and

gold paint, now barely legible. These and original iron palisade gates remain, although the western

pillars and panel were moved and a new section installed when the driveway was widened in the

1980s for prison trucks to enter. The drive curves through the garden, laid out to give a variety of

glimpses along the way up the gentle slope towards the house. It is obscured by strategically placed

vegetation, until revealed at the point of the teardrop bed around which the carriage loop turns.

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Driveway curves up to the house, hidden from view (photo Gina Plate 2019)

It is thought the garden was planted in Loudon’s Gardenesque style where unusual, exotic,

individually planted specimens were placed to be admired separately, without the distraction of

surrounding ornamentals.

On the axis between the front door and the centre of the front gates is a now-dilapidated sunken

garden. Its detailing, including benches around the walls suggests a previous use as a fernery: in

the Victorian era there was a passion for ferns (and palms) and ferneries were popular garden

additions. The walls are now bowing dangerously inwards and until recently weedy plants filled

the shelves obscuring its form.

Left: Sunken fernery before volunteers worked on it 2019 Right: Fernery 2020 showing ‘benches’ and

bowing walls (photos Gina Plate)

Fortunately, the garden is basically intact. Several original trees and a few shrubs survived its

thirty-year phase as a manicured ‘institution’ garden: its rare trees such as Picconia excelsa

(Canary Island laurel), Brachyciton discolor (Queensland lacebark), Gingko biloba (maidenhair

tree), Agathis robusta and A. lanceolata (Queensland and Pacific kauries), Jubaea chilensis

(Chilean wine palm), shrubs such as Dombeya natalensis (Natal wedding flower), and rare

camellias amongst others, plus 1990s plantings.

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Garden plan showing location of major trees and shrubs, driveway and tear drop bed. Trees on western boundary no longer exist. Blank areas right and left were walled youth detention accommodation centres. (drawn Gina Plate, 2003 CMP)

Ginkgo biloba autumn colours

Rare Camellia japonica ‘Aspasia’ strain or

Camellia japonica Macarthur

Dombeya natalensis

Natal Wedding bush Photo Angie Gallinaro

The volunteer effort My association with the Yasmar began in the late 1980s when, as a Public Works Landscape

Technical Officer, I organised a heritage gardener to work in the garden for 6 months to clear

weeds and do some infill planting. In 2003, I wrote the landscape sections of a Conservation

Management Plan for the place. My interest was piqued again by a 2015 visit to Yasmar I helped

organise for AGHS members. I subsequently joined the Haberfield Association, having been a

judge in the annual Haberfield Garden Competition. In 2018, I gave an illustrated talk to the

Haberfield Association, raising concerns about the current poor state of the garden and worries

about its possible future.

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The talk generated such interest that the ‘Friends of Yasmar’ group re-formed, many members of

which are now keen weekly volunteer gardeners at Yasmar. We have a licence from Crown Lands

who have supported our efforts - providing funds for tools, removing many of the large weedy

shrubs we can’t get out with our hand tools, and paying contractors to regularly remove the HUGE

piles of green waste we accumulate (material we can’t compost). Crown Lands has also had work

done in the house to repair water damage and prevent further water ingress as well as some

painting and other repairs. We have received a community grant for more tools and equipment

and applied this year for a grant to fence the collapsing fernery for public safety until we have the

funds to have it repaired.

Our weeding efforts have been so successful that the place now has a park-like feel. It is hoped

that improving the garden’s look and activating it with events such as the 2019s Heritage Month

Open Day attended by nearly 400 people, and this year’s Market day (postponed due to Corona

virus), that the garden will enter a new and different phase as a much-needed local and regional

open space with some kind of garden restoration and unique heritage values.

Gordon Hill clearing a patch of Canadian fleabane Gordon’s patch ‘after’ (photos Gina Plate)

Some of Yasmar’s trees seen from the house Yasmar garden volunteers with Juvenile Justice staff

(photo Gina Plate 2020) volunteers-for-a-day (in blue) October 2018

Unknown photographer