On The Verge At The Waves 2019

House Notes – On The Verge At The Waves

Open Garden – as part of our home environmental efforts we have surrounded our renovated railway worker’s cottage with a native garden. Folk passing by often linger over our small verge garden and derive pleasure from it so we thought we would invite you too!

Our home is not open but we warmly welcome visitors who fancy some inspiration or ideas for planting up a north facing verge and front garden with plants that are pretty, mostly tough, do not need much water or maintenance and are bird attracting. We can also show you our eastern and western gardens which are more challenging and are planted with shade tolerant plants. The backyard includes both a food garden as well as native plants … but it is presently being re-landscaped by a 4 month old puppy so some is fenced off and it is not open this year.

Although our focus has been on creating a habitat for birds we are interested in all critters and the flowers and foliage have also been chosen for insects and other invertebrates to enjoy. We have a range of native bees and regularly see blue-banded bees, carpenter bees and teddy bear bees.

Our garden includes decaying hollow logs for lizards, a frog pond and nestboxes for possums and micro bats. Brushtailed and ringtailed possums are here and the flowers of our neighbour’s overhanging Camellia are a favourite for both ringtailed possums and King parrots …. so this non-native plant has special status. Many of the species planted are local to NSW, but the garden also includes quite a few plants from Western Australia including Kangaroo Paws which are a favourite with honeyeaters.

The impact on birdlife of transforming our original garden (basically lawn and two small trees) into a native garden has been enormous. Firstly, removing most of the lawn and just replacing it with shrubs made our place unattractive to the invasive Indian Myna and they departed. As we built up the structure and diversity of plants more bird species visited and every year we observe more and different species. Just last week we spotted our first figbird and the gorgeous bower birds and catbirds are often seen. This year, for the first time, mixed species feeding parties of honey eaters and thornbills are coming through and the fairy wrens made their first appearance. So if you are into native plants and birds come and say hello on Sunday 15th. NOTE: the wonderful Grevillea Park in nearby Bulli is also open on Sunday 15th