Creating a Garden Ecosystem

You may think that using waterwise or native plants in your garden restricts your ability to have lawn and colour. But you can design and create a multipurpose landscape to suit the needs of your family. By mimicking the diversity in biological systems, your garden and home work together with your lifestyle for comfort and pleasure.

Native gardens are excellent along the edges of your property or if you have waterways on your site. They are low maintenance, low in water needs, can be beautiful and colourful and provide natural screens and even fruit and foods. They also create a barrier to lawn and garden pests and provide valuable wildlife and restorative services for your local environment.

Closer to the house are the areas you more frequently visit. These are the areas you might have fruit trees or decorative plants or animals such as chickens, ducks or a worm farm - valuable additions and nutrient sources for your garden ecosystem. Other additions such as regular composting and mulching do wonders for the water and nutrient cycles that maintain healthy plants and balanced insect populations.

Closest to the house are your outdoor living spaces, your daily pathways and the places where your ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ meet and converge. This area can encompass things like kitchen gardens, lawn areas, clotheslines and patios. You may like to have a herb garden near the kitchen door or window. A herb garden in the form of a raised spiral makes more efficient use of space as well as creates microhabitats to fulfil the different needs of certain herb species. A rotating vegie garden system is a great way to reconnect to the earth and your food sources; it’s also excellent for children’s learning. You also want the places where you spend time to be cool, shady and attractive, and seasonally sensitive. Thoughtful planting can tie these things together, as well as improve the garden, such as using comfrey, marigolds, lemongrass or pennyroyal in border plantings. They repel pest insects, hold water and fix nutrients for your garden. Deciduous plants such as grapes or cashew trees block summer sun and allow winter sun to warm your living spaces.

All these elements need to connect and flow around your site in a way that makes time spent outdoors rewarding. People’s needs are as diverse as our ecosystems; you may want all natives, you may not have time to grow vegetables or you may have a difficult site. A thoughtful balance can be struck between your needs, your aesthetics and the services you’d like your garden to provide to your home and to the environment.