🌿 Who Is Responsible for Garden Maintenance in a Strata Scheme in NSW?

In most strata schemes the garden problem is not neglect, it is ambiguity: two parties who each believe the other one has it covered.

Most strata garden disputes are not really about money or effort. They are about a boundary that nobody has actually looked at.

Picture a small block in Sydney's inner west. The front lawn is mown on a regular cycle, the shared driveway is swept, the letterbox garden looks presentable from the street. Behind unit four, though, a narrow strip of soil has quietly turned into a waist high tangle of privet, oxalis and self seeded weeds.

🌿 Who Is Responsible for Garden Maintenance in a Strata Scheme in NSW?

At the next committee meeting, two explanations arrive at the same time. The owners corporation believes that strip belongs to the lot, so the owner should have been cutting it. The owner believes the contractor already services "the gardens", so it should have been done months ago. Both positions sound completely reasonable, and neither person is being difficult.

Questions about garden maintenance in a strata scheme almost always come down to a boundary that nobody has checked on paper. Once you know which parts of the property are common property, which parts belong to a lot, and which parts sit under an exclusive use by law, the answer usually stops being controversial. The layers below are the order a strata manager would work through them.

🗺️ Layer 1: What Counts as Common Property in a Strata Scheme?

Common property is simply everything inside the scheme that is not part of a lot. In practice that usually includes the driveway and its edges, the shared lawns, the garden beds along the street frontage, the central courtyard, the irrigation serving those areas, and the soil they all grow in.

The owners corporation has a duty to maintain common property and keep it in a reasonable state of repair, and that work is funded through levies. This is why the mown front lawn is rarely contentious. Nobody doubts it is shared, so nobody argues about who organises the mowing.

A useful mental image is a block of units sitting inside a box. The interior of each apartment is the lot. Almost everything wrapped around those interiors, including the ground the building sits on and the planting around it, is shared by everybody.

Here is a quick test you can apply before any discussion becomes heated. Ask who would be expected to pay if a tree in that spot fell onto a parked car. If the honest answer is the owners corporation, then the garden underneath that tree is almost certainly common property too.

🏠 Layer 2: Where Does a Lot End and the Garden Begin?

The registered strata plan, not the fence line, decides where a lot ends. Fences and low hedges are often put in later for privacy, and residents reasonably assume the fence marks the legal boundary. Quite frequently it does not.

In an apartment scheme, the lot usually stops at the internal surfaces of the unit, which means essentially every garden on the site is common property. In a townhouse or villa scheme, the lot is often drawn to include a courtyard or a rear yard, so those areas belong to the owner in the same way the living room does.

The plan itself is not difficult to read once you have it in front of you. Each lot is outlined and numbered, and the areas that form part of the lot are marked. Any owner can request a copy through the strata manager, and it is also held on the public register.

Try this before your next committee meeting. Print the strata plan, walk the site slowly with it in hand, and pencil a circle around every garden area you cannot confidently allocate to either category. Those pencil circles are your real agenda, and there are usually fewer of them than the conversation suggests.

🔑 Layer 3: What Is an Exclusive Use By-Law, and Who Maintains Those Courtyards?

An exclusive use by law hands a piece of common property to one lot for its private use, and a well written one also says who maintains it from then on. These by laws are how a ground floor unit ends up with a fenced courtyard that is technically shared land, or how one lot gains the use of a side garden.

Creating that kind of by law requires a special resolution of the owners corporation and the written consent of the owner who benefits. Because the by law is registered, it travels with the lot rather than with the person, so it still applies after the unit is sold.

The maintenance answer lives inside the by law text. Most of them place the ongoing upkeep on the owner who enjoys the area, which is the outcome people generally expect. Some deliberately leave mowing or hedging with the owners corporation so the whole site keeps a consistent look, and that is equally valid.

Two failure patterns cause most of the friction here. The first is a by law that grants the space but says nothing clear about maintenance. The second is an informal arrangement, agreed years ago over a fence, that was never registered and therefore quietly evaporated when the unit changed hands.

🌳 Who Looks After Trees, Hedges and Retaining Walls?

Trees are the most common exception to whatever rule you have just established. A tree can be growing inside an exclusive use courtyard while its roots run under common property paving and its canopy hangs over a shared walkway, which makes it a scheme wide matter in everything except location.

Many schemes handle this by treating anything above roughly three metres as a decision for the owners corporation, regardless of which side of the boundary the trunk sits on. Pruning access, arborist advice, insurance and risk all sit at building level, so splitting the decision rarely works in practice.

Councils across Sydney also apply tree preservation controls, and significant pruning or removal can require approval. That alone means a single owner usually cannot resolve a tree question on their own, even when the tree is clearly within their lot.

Hedges and retaining walls follow similar logic. A hedge planted along a shared boundary is generally maintained as one element rather than in halves, and a retaining wall that holds up common land is treated as part of the structure it supports rather than as garden decoration.

The signals worth watching are concrete and easy to spot. Paving that has started to lift, drains that block after every storm, branches brushing a walkway at head height, and a hedge that is thick on one side and bare on the other all point to a boundary that needs clarifying before the repair bill arrives.

💧 Who Pays for Watering, Fertilising and Replacing Plants?

Maintenance and improvement are different categories, and budgets get stuck exactly where the two blur. Mowing, edging, weeding, hedging, mulching and general tidying are maintenance of common property, and they are normally funded from the administrative fund as an ongoing service.

Replacing a dead hedge with a different species, installing new irrigation, or redesigning a bed is an improvement. Depending on the cost and the scheme, an improvement can need a resolution at a general meeting rather than a decision by the committee alone.

This distinction explains a surprising amount of misplaced frustration. A contractor gets blamed for a garden that looks tired when the agreed scope covers cutting and tidying but contains nothing about feeding, replanting or watering during a dry spell.

Try this with your current contract. Read the scope and highlight every verb in it. If the list is only mow, edge, blow and trim, then nobody has been engaged to improve the garden, and the garden is behaving exactly as commissioned.

📋 What Should You Do When a Garden Is Clearly Being Neglected?

Start with the document rather than the personality. Confirm from the strata plan and the registered by laws whether the area is common property, part of a lot, or subject to an exclusive use by law, because every sensible next step depends on that answer.

If it turns out to be common property, the conversation belongs with the strata manager and the committee, and it is usually a scope or frequency problem rather than a blame problem. Adjusting a service schedule is far quicker than pursuing anybody.

If it belongs to a lot or an exclusive use area, model by laws generally require owners to keep their lot in a condition that is in keeping with the rest of the scheme. A polite written request resolves most cases, and there is a formal breach process available when it does not, with NSW Fair Trading offering mediation for disputes that stall.

One caveat matters throughout. Schemes differ, and the registered by laws for your building always govern the specifics, so anything genuinely contested is worth putting to your strata manager or a strata lawyer rather than settling by majority opinion at a meeting.

🗓️ A Realistic Starting Point You Can Adapt

If you want a default position to work from, this is a reasonable one for a typical Sydney strata scheme. Shared lawns, frontage beds, driveway edges and central courtyards sit with the owners corporation and are serviced on a regular cycle, commonly fortnightly through the warmer months from September to March and monthly across the cooler part of the year.

Hedges on common property generally hold their shape with two to four trims a year, timed after the main flushes of growth. Mulch on shared beds is worth topping up once a year, usually in spring, since it does more for weed suppression and moisture retention than any single other task.

Exclusive use courtyards default to the owner unless the by law says otherwise, and a short written reminder each spring, sent to all affected lots at once, prevents the awkward individual conversation later. Trees above roughly three metres are treated as a scheme level decision with arborist advice.

One more habit is worth building in. Walk the whole site once in early spring with the strata plan in hand, note anything unclear, and settle those points while the garden is growing rather than in January when it has already got away from everyone.

🏡 Final Thoughts

Responsibility for garden maintenance in a strata scheme follows the boundary, and the boundary is written down. Common property sits with the owners corporation, lot land sits with the owner, and exclusive use areas sit wherever the registered by law places them, which is usually with the owner who enjoys the space.

The reason this question keeps resurfacing is not that the rules are obscure. It is that most schemes only consult the plan after something has already gone wrong, when the hedge is two metres over, the roots have lifted a path, or two neighbours are no longer speaking.

A garden that has a name against every square metre and a service cycle that matches the growing season almost never produces a dispute. Prevention here is not a maintenance philosophy, it is simply cheaper and calmer than the alternative.

👉 Is there a garden area in your scheme that nobody seems to be looking after? Click here to get a free quote and see how a clearly scoped, regular garden maintenance programme can keep your common areas consistent and take the guesswork out of who does what.