It doesn’t have to be an award-winning or professional garden
It doesn’t have to be an award-winning or professional garden
One of the big advantages of slow iterative gardening using cheap tubestock, seedlings, and home propagation, is that mistakes don't matter, you can experiment as you try different plants.
Lots of imperfectly designed gardens reflecting the preferences of each resident makes for a more biodiverse and interesting street. (story here) It's also the only way we are going to be able to green our cities and suburbs quickly.
Observe and Experiment
One of the big advantages of slow iterative gardening using cheap tubestock, seedlings, and home propagation, is that mistakes don't matter, you can experiment as you try different plants.
Use plants as messengers. As well as signalling some formality, the westringia shrubs signal the beginning of the verge garden.
Before, and even after, I started the verge garden, the neighbour's garden maintenance man used to impinge well across the boundary line with his mow short and blast the ground with his whipper snipper routine. To be fair, he probably thought he was doing me a favour. It was time to make a demarcation line.
People who value "flat and neat" see anything grass-like as needing mowing. They will mow straight over many plants. While the groundcovers beneath the westringia still suffered from being blasted the shrubs looked sufficiently non-grasslike to escape harm.
Look at what grows well inside your garden or in your suburb and use your local community nursery. If you are lucky enough to have a Gardens for Wildlife scheme in your area, they can also help with local knowledge. When searching online, check the location. Suitable plants in one state may be weeds in another.
Even then, you might find that some plants do better than you expect and some fail to thrive. My garden is now old enough that I've had to replace some plants that suddenly turned up their toes, and swapped some plants to see if another will do better.
Monitor the reactions of others including your neighbours. Some will comment on plants they like and ask you for names of the plants. Plant more of these.
Verge gardens don't just create connections between bigger pieces of habitat, they help build connections between people and their community, and connections between people and nature.
Watch and listen for interactions between the plants and the people walking and cycling by. I've been surprised by things like:
the elderly lady reaching out and touching the cosmos flowers that had grown so tall that she didn't have to bend down
teenagers casually picking a paper daisy as they walked by with their friends
grandparents talking to children: I haven't seen one of those flowers since I was a little girl
neighbourhood children collecting different flowers to take home for a school project (accompanied by an adult with scissors)
This free article is part of the Understanding the Space section: bite-sized introductions to gardening in these small but wonderfully complex spaces.