Gardening with Margaret Matthews
Re-inventing the nature strip
by Margaret Matthews
In the early 1980s, my friend Iona looked at the untidy patch of ground between the footpath and the busy highway in front of her house and applied some lateral thinking to the problem. I wrote about her solution in The Age at that time, but I think it should now be resurrected, for there will be many sad, dried up strips of so-called ‘lawn’ in front of suburban houses this year. Stage two water restrictions mean that we cannot water our lawns and, in any case, if we care about the environment, then we should not wish to waste water in this way.
Referred to in English dictionaries as ‘the verge’, the area between footpath and road is known in Australia, and acknowledged in the Macquarie Dictionary, as the ‘nature strip’. Whoever concocted this phrase allows those with a fertile imagination free rein. It could conjure up visions of a spontaneous romp by nudists, or the artist Norman Lindsay staging a frolic in his garden in the Blue Mountains.
My friend’s plan required some considerable effort to achieve a final result. She painstakingly removed the entrenched weeds, each time reclaiming about a metre of the heavy clay-based soil of what was then considered the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Then she would dig over this patch and plant it with drought-resistant ground covers. These included one of the chamomiles (anthemis montana) Stachys byzantina, known as Lamb’s Ears, variegated apple mint, Iris montana, a dwarf purple variety, Lemon thyme, Erigeron karvinskianus, the invasive English seaside daisy, which gains a foothold anywhere, but will struggle to get out of hand in heavy soil.
White, silver, green, pink and purple colours predominated, with the yellow eye of the chamomile flowers and the soft cream flowers of the apple mint providing a further contrast. It is disappointing that the photograph is not in colour, however, you can see that the plants not only survived, they thrived.
You may have noticed that all the plants used were exotics, excepting the Erigeron. This was not a random choice, as my friend is a botanist, and the plants mostly originated in Mediterranean countries, which have a similar climate to ours and were therefore tough and drought tolerant.
Once a year the patch was weeded and the more unruly plants cut back. It received no water except what nature provided.
Iona’s nature strip was further enhanced by a rosemary hedge, planted in close to her front fence, which provided a sound barrier between the house and the busy highway. Note that the plants exposed to the petrol fumes did not appear to be affected.
Iona no long lives in this house, but I am sure that her alternative to the conventional nature strip has been noted and copied by many other gardeners and that this reminder will inspire others to do away with their faded, jaded, unattractive strip of grass.
If you decided to ‘go native’ there are many ground covers, including prostrate grevilleas, brachycome daisies, some species of the versatile correas come to mind. If plants other than ground covers were chosen, the Eremophila-Emu bushes, whose natural habitat is the Australian desert, have a number of species with attractive flowers and foliage that grow to a little over a metre in height and are not wide-spreading, which makes them ideal for this purpose.
There are many other plants that could be considered for nature strip planting. Remember that most plants with grey or silver foliage are drought tolerant and relish heat. Gazanias, which are exotic ground covers, can have grey or dark green foliage which withstands very hot and dry conditions and they have attractive and colourful daisy-like flowers in shades of cream, yellow, muted orange, rust and pink.
As we move further into this third millennium, we are becoming increasingly more aware of the need to plant wisely and to water less. Municipal councils could assist in this, by providing advice and drought tolerant plants from their own nurseries, to stimulate interest from ratepayers and benefit the environment.
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