SUNDAY'S GARDENGROWING HEIDE

Heide was the home and personal Eden of Sunday and John Reed, two of Australia’s most significant art benefactors. While the cultural and social history of Heide has been extensively documented, less has been told about the physical environment in which that history was made and its significance to the Reeds’ lives and their legacy.

When Sunday and John purchased the 16 acre property in 1934 it was a neglected former dairy farm. At the end of their lives, it was a verdant parkland,densely forested with exotic and native flora, with a stunningly beautiful cottage-style kitchen garden the jewel in its crown—in all, an extraordinary aesthetic accomplishment in itself, the result of fifty years of vision, dedication and sheer hard work.

This exhibition and the accompanying publication explore in depth the growing of Heide, and in doing so fully restore the Heide garden into the stories surrounding this inspiring site. Central to this narrative is the elusive, paradoxical and endlessly fascinating Sunday Reed, described by Albert Tucker as ‘the key mother goddess figure’, for whom gardening went hand-in-hand with art, poetry, cooking, love, and life. Based on new research and enriched by the reminiscences of friends and acquaintances, Sunday’s Garden features art, archival photographs, personal correspondence and other original material, revealing another dimension of Heide’s complex and compelling story.