Sayville garden is home to whale of a bush

Bob and Jeannine Bernard have lived on Candee Avenue since 1984, and have always kept their garden extremely well-maintained with perennials, evergreen trees and a fish pond.

But, thanks to a chance comment at a garden tour, the Sayville couple’s garden is now mostly known for its 30-foot long, 6-foot-high bush shaped like a whale.

“We get comments all the time,” Bob Bernard, 54, said. “It’s just nice when people take the time to make their property look nice so that others who are walking or biking in the neighborhood can enjoy it. It would be nice if more people could do that.”

When the Bernards first moved in, the large ilex bush had never been pruned.

Now, almost every time Bernard goes out to prune the whale with his hedge clippers, he receives compliments from neighbors.

Since he is about 6 feet tall, he is able to trim the hedges of the mammal himself without the use of a ladder or other tools. Each time he prunes the ilex it becomes denser and takes on a more obvious whale-like shape.

“It must be happy where it is because its shape is holding up and nature is doing most of the work,” Bob Bernard said.

Once, he and his wife, Jeannine, 53, woke up to find a silver globe placed in the bush overnight to represent the whale’s eye.

“It’s one of the landmarks of the neighborhood,” said Mary DiGiovanna, 64, a neighbor of the whale-bearing house. “I’ve seen people gathered around it taking pictures.”

In 2006, the Sayville Garden Club, a group that sponsors community gardens and provides scholarships to students going into environmental science, contacted the Bernards to participate in their bi-annual garden tour.

“Garden club members suggest gardens that they know are especially outstanding to be on the tour,” said Pat Osarchuk, president of the Sayville Garden Club.

On the garden tours, about 60 people from the club visit the gardens of six to eight homes.

“During the tour, I heard a little boy say, ‘I want to buy the house with the whale,’” Jeannine Bernard said of a child who thought their large, rectangular hedges resembled a whale.

It was then that the Bernards were inspired to transform the hedge in their side yard completely into a whale, adding a tail, fins and spout.

“We never planned on actually trimming it into a whale shape until that boy pointed out the resemblance to the large hedges we already had,” Bob Bernard said.

The main reason for the Bernards to continue maintaining this neighborhood landmark is the smiles by passersby, Jeannine Bernard said.

“It’s good to be part of the community and to try to help improve the looks of that community. People have stopped by a lot of times and said, ‘Oh, I love your whale!’”