I'm in White Gum Valley, near Fremantle, to meet David Broun,
part of the Valley Verges,
a community group reclaiming their verges together.
This is a big verge. It is, Josh.
It is around 400 square metres with the footpath.
Which is actually bigger than our house.
It was all couch, a couch wasteland, basically.
And a few weeds.
We weren't getting much in return.
We were just mowing it, it was dusty, it was dry,
and a bit of an eyesore, really.
So the first thing we needed to do was to get rid of all that couch
and those weeds, and so we got a bobcat in,
and we took top 100mm off,
and removed that out of the way completely.
And did that deal with most of the weeds?
It did. We had bits and pieces coming through over time,
but we just had to be vigilant and pulling mainly the couch out.
The garden as you see it now is about two years old.
All the plants on this verge are more or less endemic,
which means they're suited to the soil here, and they'll grow well.
We mainly planted tube stock.
That's the most simple and cost-effective way,
and they soon catch up to the other plants that are more expensive
in bigger pots.
We water a lot initially.
We plant in winter, so we have the rainfall helping us out there.
And then over summer we water every two or three weeks.
And after that, they're on their own.
Well, things are really taking off.
I couldn't help but to spot a quandong up the back there.
Yes, you've found the favourite plant in the garden,
Josh, absolutely. Shall we take a look?
Yeah.
This is a really healthy young specimen.
But so is its host, this acacia saligna as well.
It is. So, be quandong is hemiparasitic,
which means that under the ground,
it's latching onto the roots of that saligna
and getting all that nutrients and water to help it grow.
It's almost time to start pruning that Acacia back, I reckon.
It is. We'll slowly take that off, and let the quandong grow,
and in a few years we'll have people on the verge picking quandongs.
You certainly will.
I might pop around again then.
Although only planted a couple of years ago,
Dave's verge is now bursting with biodiversity,
incorporating 350 individual plants,
comprising around 100 different species,
in what was once barren space.
There is an impressive array of eremophilas,
kangaroo grass, as well as endemic tuart trees,
to continue the theme with older plantings in the street.
One of the really great benefits has been
the involvement of my daughter Stella in developing this garden,
and seeing her sort of grow
and understand all the different plants and animals
that have appeared since we started that verge.
And I think that's in no small part one of the reasons why
she's now studying landscape architecture at uni.
David's daughter Stella and her friend Isaac
are budding photographers,
and have been documenting wildlife in the verge garden
as it establishes.
What types of fauna are you seeing in the verge garden?
The most common fauna we find are small arthropods,
invertebrates,
and they include slaters, ants,
but some of the highlights are, like, the blue-banded bees
and the peacock spiders that we find quite regularly now.
Stella, what inspired you to start to document the fauna
of the verge?
It's just really refreshing to come out here, and even in the morning,
just spend some time out here and just walk through.
It's just like a really lovely way to start your day,
and when you start noticing little details,
little, like, as Isaac says, the biodiversity starts to increase,
and everything just comes alive,
and that's what kind of really motivated me to start.
Directly opposite Dave's place
is the home of fellow Valley Verges Ian and Daphne,
who have taken a slightly different approach.
Our garden is a bit more curated than Dave's.
I'm not sure that we started out with that in mind,
but we were looking at trying to put some retaining walls in
to keep the soil back, and to stop run-off.
And once we've done the curved paths,
then all the rest fell in behind that,
and we've sort of been picked up on that structure in designing
the rest of the plantings.
Ian, you've mass planted, largely, but there's still a lot of diversity
in the garden?
Yes, there's probably somewhere between 500-600 plants,
but I think there's 60 species.
What safety considerations
were incorporated into the plant selection
and the layout of the garden?
We tried to follow the council's guidelines on verge planting,
and that includes things like keeping the plants very low
as you get close to the sight lines of the street.
So it's safer for cars, safer for pedestrians.
The only big plants are right back towards the house.
There's also been a really great community benefit.
You know, and that starts when you're out here on the garden,
people walk past and you just have a chat and talk about gardening
and everything else.
As more and more people in the valley have started growing
verge gardens, we've really seen things snowball,
and we've sort of come together as a loose group
where we get together, we help people set up their own gardens
and share plants and share stories
and it's just a great community process.
We've learned a lot, for sure.
It's certainly easier than lawn.
It can be as complex or as simple as you want.
Yeah.
We go about sharing knowledge from events like this on our verges,
chatting, or it can be through our Facebook page.
It's inspiring to see how one community group
can have such a positive impact on the streetscape of a suburb.
Bringing the benefits of cooling, wildlife habitat,
and creating connections to one another along the way.
Check your local council requirements before planting out a verge,
and remember, know the location of services,
both above and below ground, and dial before you dig.
that our native Australian plants have
to all sorts of different conditions.
And I learned about carnivorous plants and how they have evolved
to not only survive but thrive in nutrient poor soils.
And that we have such a huge diversity of them here,
and, yeah, I was just hooked on them.
Right now we're in the beautiful Alison Baird Nature Reserve.
It's a beautiful biodiversity hot spot right in the centre
of an industrial part of Perth.
We are surrounded by cars,
and industry and residential areas, so, yeah.
But it's a very beautiful, special spot.
A lot of people might be surprised to find out that Western Australia
is actually a global centre of carnivorous plant diversity.
We've got about a third of the world's carnivorous plant species
right here in WA, both here in the south-west corner
and up in the northern Kimberley region.
What we're looking at right here is a kind of drosera, or a sundew.
This one is a drosera erythrorhiza, or the red ink sundew.
It's a tuberous carnivorous plant, a tuberous drosera.
So it has a little tuber that grows at the bottom
that it'll die back to and then it will grow from the next season.
These plants eat all sorts of bugs, basically.
Any unlucky insect that happens to be walking along
and gets stuck in the sticky tentacles
is what the plant will end up eating.
Going on a bush walk with me, there is a lot of stopping
and looking at plants and taking lots of photos.
You kind of have to tune your eyes in.
Once you've seen one of the drosera, with its sparkly dew,
you'll start seeing them everywhere.
Having a closer look at the plants
really gives you a deeper appreciation of them.
You can really see how they are put together and what they're doing.
Cool. So, we have here one of the climbing drosera.
And you can see that it's climbing all the way up from down here
up to here,
and this one is really interesting because its leaves,
basically, if you look really closely,
you can see that they kind of have a shape a bit like this.
And basically what they'll do is, when in insect lands,
the tentacles will wrap around the prey there.
But what it's also doing is that some of its sticky leaves
it's using to help it climb up.
So there's one here which is holding on to this grass here,
and it's just doing that all the way up.
It's got these extra long sticky leaves that it's using to climb up.
These plants really amazed me,
and how they have adapted to this environment to be able to climb up
even higher into their ecosystems
so they can catch even more and different kinds of prey.
I have carried out a part of my PhD research here in the reserve.
I was looking at a lot of different species of drosera,
so some of these climbing ones, some of the flat ones.
All sorts of different species.
And looking at them over time to see how their nutrition changed
across the season.
My research took me to a lot of different places,
so I've been all over the south-west to look at carnivorous plants.
I've also been up in the Kimberley region,
which is another diversity hot spot for carnivorous plants.
And I've also gotten to go to Germany to do all my lab work
with a world-renowned stable isotope expert over there.
I got to spend time there in the lab and learn these new techniques.
Yeah, it was amazing.
My research has been looking at basically how carnivorous
are carnivorous plants?
So how much do they rely on and benefit from the prey
that they capture, in terms of their nutrition.
So the way that I figure out how much they benefit from the prey
that they are capturing is that I use stable isotope techniques.
When I'm out in the field, I will collect a small sample
of leaves with a scientific licence for collection.
I will dry them and bring them back to the lab.
When I'm in the lab, I will grind up the dried plant leaf samples,
into a little powder, I measure out that powder,
weigh it into these little tin capsules.
The tin capsules get folded up like a little burrito,
and then put into the isotope ratio mass spectrometer
which measures, basically, the isotope ratio of the sample.
We are looking specifically at nitrogen, which is an element
that is really essential for plant growth, and reproduction.
But is also very limited in our soils here.
So the plants really rely, in a way, on the insects that they capture
to get the nitrogen that they would otherwise struggle to get sometimes
from the soil.
While I was in Europe I also got the chance to go to the house
and gardens of Charles Darwin.
Going to Darwin's House was just incredible,
to be able to go around in the place that he lived
and did all his research, and especially his gardens
and even more so his glasshouse, where he did all of his experiments
on carnivorous plants.
I was surprised to learn how much work he had done on them
when I first started studying carnivorous plants,
but he basically provided the first scientific evidence that
these plants are actually able to capture and digest insect prey.
One of the things that Darwin found was that these plants particularly
respond to substances that have nitrogen in them.
That's kind of the basis of my isotope research,
knowing that nitrogen is such an essential element,
and it is what the plants are reacting to in the prey
and that we can measure that using a stable isotope techniques.
At the moment, I am writing up all of my research
to hopefully get it published, and to finish my PhD.
But in the future I'd love to be able to keep working
with carnivorous plants,
and especially more on the lines of how do we conserve them
and how do people and plants interact?
That's what I'm really interested in.
Now, it may well be the last weekend in winter, but don't worry.
I've got plenty of jobs to keep you warm.
In cool temperate areas, warming weather sees aphids active.
So keep an eye out, especially on the underside of Brassica leaves.
Squash them if you see them to deter their mates.
Spring salads and sangers are not the same without lettuce,
so for a twist on these lovely leaves, direct sow the seeds
of heirloom varieties, like freckles, merlot
and red velvet now.
Another sandwich staple is beetroot,
and it's time to harvest those sown in winter.
The most obliging of root vegies, you can see their crown
above the soil surface.
The smaller the crown, the more tender the beet.
In warm temperate gardens, the smell of sweetpeas
is in the air.
Cut some blooms for a vase.
You'll encourage further flowers, and get to enjoy
the intoxicating scent indoors.
The grass is growing, so it's the perfect time
to de-thatch your lawn.
Using a thatching rake, remove any dead stems
and other debris that's collected between the grass and the soil.
With passionfruits harvested,
it's time to give overgrown vines a haircut.
Remove dead wood and prune back to 1m diameter from the trunk.
Your vine will be happier, healthier,
and more productive for it.
In the subtropics, broad beans are starting to flower.
But they won't set fruit until the weather warms up a little more.
Keep the water up to them, give them a feed, and wait.
Whether you dig sweets or savouries, cordial or cocktails,
you can't go past a homegrown lime or two.
Plant a Tahitian lime for tart, juicy fruits
and a makrut for its foliage and zest.
Cyclamens are coming to the close of their fab floral show.
So it's time to give them a rest.
Allow the tubers to dry out and place them on their sides
under the shade of a tree, until next year.
Tropical gardeners, the sun has a bite to it,
and if you're feeling it, so is your garden.
Knock together some shade cloth covers and teepees to protect
vulnerable and sensitive plants.
Easy to grow and generous once they fruit, sow pumpkin seeds now.
Make sure they have room to room, and don't be afraid to experiment
with different varieties like Turk's Turban.
Two spotted mite are emerging after winter, mottling leaves,
distorting buds and leaving webbing on plants.
Treat these sap-suckers by wiping both sides of affected foliage
with a damp cloth daily for a week.
Gardeners in arid zones, if you're looking for a basil
that won't get busted by grasshoppers or hit by the heat,
try a Thai basil.
Tough and tasty with its aromatic anise flavour.
Caterpillars are getting busy, and many can make short work
of young plants.
Remove them by hand, but remember, not all caterpillars
are garden pests.
So check before you collect.
If you notice small white marks on the bark of your citrus trees,
it's likely white louse scale.
Treat with a horticultural oil before it affects the health
and vigour of your plant.
Have a fantastic weekend in the great outdoors, gardeners,
and don't forget to subscribe to our e-newsletter
for regular updates, tips, tricks and more great gardening info.
Well, that's it for the show.
But you know, rain, hail or shine, I'll meet you here again
in the garden next week.
See you then, bye!
JANE: Clematis - they've been the darlings of ornamental gardeners
for centuries.
And I met some experts who can show us the varieties to choose
and how to get the best from them.
They are such a joy, Jane, they're just so beautiful, yeah.
I still love them.
A lot of people have a love of indoor plants, but today,
I'm meeting a woman whose passion for her indoor jungle
has changed her life.
A lot of people ask me, how do you do it?
I think when you love something, you make time for it.
I'm obsessed with plants. (LAUGHS) You reckon?
And I'm taking a dive into the world of potting mix,
checking out what constitutes good quality potting mix
and how it's made.
Captions by Red Bee Media