Easy Care Gardening Celebrates 20 Years Service to Community - A Volunteer's Story

Easy Care Gardening Inc will celebrate 20 years of service to the community with a thank you celebration for volunteers on 8th August. This milestone is yet another opportunity to offer interested gardeners the chance to join a dynamic and well founded volunteer organisation.

Gardening volunteers benefit from every aspect of volunteering with Easy Care Gardening: the opportunity to keep fit outside in the fresh air, while helping their community and working with a great team of people.

Easy Care Gardening is a community based, not for profit organisation. Teams of gardening volunteers work in the gardens of frail aged and disabled pensioners living in the Hornsby, Ku-ring-gai, Ryde and Hunters Hill areas. The volunteers weed, prune, mulch and tidy the gardens, making it easier for the client to maintain. Without this service, clients can sometimes no longer look after their own homes and they become vulnerable to premature or unnecessary institutionalisation.  

Over the 20 years since its inception in 1988, Easy Care Gardening has grown from just 25 clients and two volunteers, to 1000 clients and almost 300 volunteers today. Started by Anne Shires, Kathleen Ciemiega and the late Henry Llewellyn, on a grant of just $1500 from Ku-ring-gai Council, it has grown rapidly. There are now Easy Care Gardening organisations in different suburbs all over Sydney, assisting the disadvantaged in the community.

Lyndell van Noort’s Story

Lyndell van Noort has been a volunteer with Easy Care Gardening for most of those 20 years, since early 1989. Lyndell’s first contact with Easy Care Gardening was when she responded to an article in a local paper. This article described the launch of Easy Care Gardening, and went on to say that the group "…desperately needs volunteer workers" but didn’t include a contact phone number. Luckily Lyndell was inspired enough to pursue the matter, and her original cutting of the article is covered with the notes she made in her attempt to make contact.

Having finally reached one of the founders, Anne Shires, by phone, Lyndell agreed to work as a volunteer two days a week. There was no recruitment process or form filling at that time, just "blind faith" (as Lyndell puts it now).

Lyndell is a team leader and leads a great bunch of volunteers who have each been with the organisation (and Lyndell) for longer than five years. "Volunteering for Easy Care Gardening is very fulfilling, you meet fascinating people and make wonderful friends. You give and you get a lot back in return. Our group – and I think I speak for all the volunteer teams - really look forward to working together each week, as it’s such an enjoyable occasion", Lyndell says.

Anne’s "inexhaustible capacity for work" is something Lyndell remembers from that time. Lyndell would work all day until she was dropping with tiredness. She would have to give up and go home by about four in the afternoon, but Anne would always keep working.

Many of the clients of Easy Care Gardening have lived in their homes for most of their lives. With deteriorating physical ability, due to ageing or other health issues they despair at not being able to continue to maintain their homes. Easy Care Gardening client Mrs Bea Hawkins has been assisted since October 2007. "It’s an absolutely wonderful service and such a help to someone like me in my ninety first year," she said. "The volunteers are lovely and do a great job".

For further information contact Lesley Tipping on 0402 420 082 or Wendy McCready on 0401 835 584 or the office on 02 9144 1699.

Illustration above:
Lyndell (at front on the right) and her team on "hat day".