How wonderful it was to have been visited by Michelle early last month for our Urban Wildlife Garden walk-around. We purchased our half acre patch of paradise in Tewantin in December 2020. The house was built as a farm cottage in the early 1970s and has an established garden in a wildlife corridor backing onto Moorindil Reserve. It has a number of beautiful eucalypts, banksias, grevilleas and melaleucas. It is also dotted with the usual Queensland garden suspects such as hibiscus, mango trees, stag and elk horn, lilly pillys, orchids, bromeliads, cycads, agaves, dracaenas, frangipanis, strelitzias, cordylines, agapanthuses and bougainvilleas to name a few!
Kath was between jobs when we first moved in, so she spent the first three months as a full time gardener and overseer of building and landscape improvements. We had nearly 40 very large palm trees removed from the front and back of the property, along with numerous golden cane palms whose root systems had become a bit too comfortable in our water drainage pipes, tiger grass too close to the pool, a beautiful wisteria that loved the house guttering too much and trailer loads of invasive weeds, such as heliconias and fish bone fern, which had overtaken much of the lower part of the back yard. It was a bit of a jungle, needing a machete to get to the back fence!
Since Michelle’s visit and further identification of various not so welcome plants, trees and weeds, we have had more of a cleanup. This involved getting the arborists back to remove another six Cuban and Alexander Palms along the driveway and another in the backyard, a very large umbrella tree and a pencil pine, and tidy up various precarious overhanging branches.
Our overall aim has been to attract more native birds and wildlife. We found the workshop that Shaun Walsh presented at Sunshine Butterflies, coupled with the knowledge Michelle imparted on her visit, invaluable. We now feel equipped with greater confidence to achieve our vision and add ecological value to the land for the time we are custodians.
Kath Kelly and Jo Rymer
