Bush Friendly Garden at Floriade

The Bush Friendly Garden is at Floriade again this year, tucked away in a corner, where you may easily miss it.

This informative display is not brightly tulipped and hyacinthed. Instead it shows visitors a range of environmental weeds commonly grown in gardens, and a collection of beautiful non-invasive flowering shrubs and groundcovers that can be grown instead. Many visitors are interested and sometimes amazed to find out that their ivy, periwinkle, olives, Cootamundra wattle, broom, gazanias, privet, special grasses and other plants are unwelcome when they escape the garden and invade native bushland.

Plants that are environmental weeds can (and do) grow prolifically and swamp other vegetation. They are spread by birds eating their fruit (think olives, cotoneasters, currawong poo full of orange firethorn berries or purple privet berries), or their seed may blow around easily or be readily carried by dogs and feet (think fur and seedy socks) and mowers and other means. 

Most people are fascinated to see and photograph the non-invasive alternative plants in this bush-friendly garden (BFG) at Floriade. Among these ‘good’ plants on show this year there is an unusual ‘standard’ (grafted) casuarina, and a ‘standard’ (grafted) grevillea. There are cushion-like plants, and soft ferns. There is a young Wollemi Pine, and a native indigo (Indigofera sp.), as well as an eye-catching smokebush with violet flowers — a very attractive combination — and other garden beauties.

The ACT Parks and Conservation staff members assemble this garden each year, using potted plants arranged as if in flower beds and adding decorative ‘critters’ — for example snakes and beetles (only models!) — to interest children. There are takeaway brochures, and staff who chat with the visitors who come from all over Australia, overseas, and (we hope) the local region. The more the people from this region who recognise local environmental weeds, the higher the likelihood that, gradually, local gardens will be cleared of these species and filled instead with attractive non-invasives (preferably some that will attract birdlife). Reducing the environmental weeds in gardens in turn will help prevent these repeat offenders — that is, the weeds — from requiring continual control work in local bushland and national parks.

Each year the ‘BFG’ garden is slightly different, with different alternative (good) plants and often a different arrangement. In past years the ‘good alternatives’ have been adjacent to similar ‘bad’ plants — the invasives — reflecting the pattern used in the booklet Grow Me Instead published by the Nursery and Garden Industry Association (it is also on the web: Google ‘Grow Me Instead’). This year, like last year, the bad plants are in one half of the display area and the good plants in the other.

This year, there is a lectern at the entry to each half of the area, with a rain-proofed book showing a photo and notes about, and the location of, each plant that is on display in that half. This is very helpful because many visitors are keen to know more about the plants and the volunteer staff (at least) cannot always help.

Staffing the garden remains an important means of telling visitors about environmental weeds, even though the arrangements of plants and signage give many visitors the clues they need to interpret what they see. You do really need to be a bit aware of pest plants and gardening to ‘get it’ without explanation.

Staff members from ACT Parks and Conservation are there, with volunteers, during weekdays. At weekends, only volunteers staff the garden. We come from a range of interests: some of us grow native plants, some are Friends of the national botanic gardens, some are ornithologists, others help with Weed Swap — the twice-yearly day when you can take a load of environmental-weed shrubs to one of two ACT green-waste dumps and get a small native plant in a tube in exchange. Others do Landcare work, clearing these weeds from the bush. All of us are contacts of Ms Rosemary Blemings, who is tireless in her conservation and environmental work in the ACT.

We enjoy listening to the stories our visitors tell us. This garden is a wonderful way to hear about gardening and pest control across Australia; this may be the only part of Floriade where a visitor can hold forth to an interested audience, rather than ‘tiptoe[ing] through the tulips’ (and the amazingly fragrant hyacinths and daisies and irises and…)!!

We hope this year to find out if visitors appreciate our 'BFG' and are understanding our message clearly, via a survey. One lucky respondent will win a gardening book after Floriade is over in October.

If you are at Floriade, do look for the kangaroo pond and then track down the ‘BFG’. It is near a big white marquee where cooking is demonstrated, and beyond the garden about permaculture with chooks, wicking beds and very healthy vegetable seedlings. Mr Costa Georgiadis visited that garden last weekend, and maybe he will call in on us one day. We hope so.

Footnote:

Mr Shane Rattenbury, MLA, has visited the garden and he sent out this Tweet: Shane Rattenbury ‏@ShaneRattenbury24 Sep Just checked out the Bush Friendly Garden at #Floriade #canberra - great ideas for non-invasive garden plants pic.twitter.com/UngmXQJZUg