Landscaping across Lake Macquarie
Fernline Landscapes builds gardens all around the northern half of Lake Macquarie, and yours has different problems from one in Newcastle. It might sit a few metres above the water in Warners Bay or Toronto, or on a sloping estate block in Cameron Park. We plan for whichever one you have.
NSW contractor licence, structural landscaping: Lic. 000000C (demo)
Each has its own page: the ground, the houses, the council rules and the jobs we do there.
Around the lake, the first question for a new garden is how close it sits to the water and how high above it. Everything else follows from that answer.
Lake Macquarie City Council looks after a city wrapped around a saltwater lake, and that changes what a backyard has to cope with. Close to the shore in Warners Bay, Belmont and Toronto, the ground is low, the lake can rise in a big storm, and the council has its own policy for waterway flooding and tidal inundation. Away from the water, in Glendale and Cameron Park, the risk shifts to slopes, old coal workings underground and, on the bushland edges, fire. Your garden needs a plan built for the ground it actually sits on.
Every garden here sits somewhere between the waterline and the ridges, and that position sets the job. Closer to the water, the question is what happens to your yard when the lake comes up after a big storm. Further from the shore, it's what the slope and the old mine workings underneath will do to a wall. Get that first question right and the rest of the design falls into place.
In Warners Bay, Toronto and the low streets of Belmont, plenty of backyards sit only a few metres above the lake. Each shore suburb has its own twist. In Warners Bay the yard usually slopes down to the view. In Belmont you're on sand, with the ocean on the other side of the peninsula. In Toronto many gardens run all the way to the water's edge, past houses on streets first laid out in 1887. A good garden still works on all three, built in a set order: drainage and levels first, then planting that copes with wet roots and salt wind.
Away from the water, Glendale and Cameron Park are a different job. Most of Cameron Park has been built since the late 1990s, so a lot of the homes are young and the blocks were cut and filled to fit them. You're often left with a bank behind the house and builder's turf on compacted ground. Where the streets meet the bush, some blocks are mapped as bush fire prone. Glendale's older blocks are bigger and more settled, but tired. On both, the work starts with drainage and levels, then walls, then planting.
Our yard is in Broadmeadow, in Newcastle, north of the lake. Glendale and Warners Bay are about a quarter of an hour away, Belmont about twenty minutes and Toronto under half an hour. We plan Lake Macquarie jobs so the truck goes out loaded early, the crew stays on one site all day, and nobody's paying for us to drive back and forth for one forgotten bag of sand.
They checked the flood map and the subsidence map before they quoted, and told us which part of the plan needed approval. No surprises after that.
Karen, Speers Point · Sample review
Before any design, your address goes through Lake Macquarie's flood, acid sulfate soils and bush fire maps and the mine subsidence viewer, so nothing gets drawn twice.
Low retaining walls, steps and drainage for the cut-and-fill blocks on the newer estates, so a steep backyard turns into flat ground you can use.
Retaining walls in Lake MacquarieCoastal natives and tough lawns for the sandy strip between the lake and the ocean, where salt and wind finish off most garden-centre plants.
Garden design in Lake MacquarieNew levels, paths and beds for older blocks around the lake's town centres, where decades of add-ons have left the backyard in pieces.
Paving in Lake MacquarieMostly the northern half of the lake. Warners Bay, Glendale, Cameron Park, Belmont and Toronto are where we work most, and Toronto, the furthest of those, is about 27 minutes from our Broadmeadow yard. If you're further south, call us and we'll tell you whether we can do your job well from here.
The basics are similar, but the rules come from a different place. Lake Macquarie works from its own LEP 2014 and DCP 2014, plus its own policy on lake flooding and tidal inundation. We check your address against Lake Macquarie's maps, not Newcastle's, before we draw anything.
Very different. Down by the water the work is about wet ground, wind off the lake and what the council's lake rules allow. Up the hill it's about slope: walls, steps and getting storm water off the block. Many Lake Macquarie yards have a bit of both, a slope that runs down to wet ground, and the design deals with the slope first.
Glendale, Cameron Park, Warners Bay and Belmont appear on Subsidence Advisory NSW's Lake Macquarie district map, and Toronto on the West Lake map. The maps are only an overview, so we check your exact address in the NSW Planning Portal's spatial viewer. Inside a district, most building work needs Subsidence Advisory NSW approval, but its exempt list covers retaining walls up to 1m and pergolas up to 50 square metres on every property, and decks up to 50 square metres on some, depending on the guideline. A taller wall or a bigger structure is what usually needs approval, and we check it before quoting.
Often not. Under the NSW Codes SEPP, a wall up to 600mm is exempt from approval only if it sits at least 40m from a natural waterbody, along with its other conditions, and it can't be exempt on a flood control lot at all. On a lakefront block in Warners Bay, Belmont or Toronto, that usually means a wall near the water needs approval, so Fernline measures the distance before we design.
No separate charge. Travel time is built into the quote like everything else, so the price you see is the price you pay whether you live in Glendale or Toronto.
A few photos and a rough idea is enough. We'll ring to book a free site visit, then send a fixed quote with a drawing.