When it comes to his native habitat garden, Tye Purnell is happy to share – but most of his regular diners aren't humans.
Tye is throwing open the gates for November's Edible Garden Trail for all comers to check out; after all, he is used to indulging whichever odd hungry passer-by nature throws up.
“There are a few bush foods and plants that will be producing fruits when the trail is on, but most of the stuff in the yard is just for the wildlife,” the Mt Kembla horticulturalist says.
This year’s Illawarra Edible Garden Trail includes more than 30 diverse gardens from Helensburgh to Shell Cove. Maps in hand, trail-goers will have the opportunity to visit all kinds of gardens – backyard vegie patches, verge and balcony gardens, school and community projects. Gardeners across the diverse Illawarra terrain will open their garden gates to share tips and tricks.
But the trail hasn’t just expanded on the map; it now includes gardens that might not be edible for humans but provide a thriving space for native flora and fauna – gardens such as Tye’s.
"I always wanted to do an open garden,'' he says, ''but because the trail was food related, I was like, 'Oh, well, I don't really apply.' I asked a few questions when they started advertising this year – I was like ‘well, it's all edible, just not for people. Does that count?''
When Tye and his family moved in, the garden was all lawn, with a handful of exotic palm trees. Tye says the yard was full of common myna birds, and the soil was hard, full of rock and coal. Today the garden is full of native plants, insect hotels and a natural pond system with two ponds connected by a five-metre flowing creek – with almost no lawn.
“Ten years later having all these plants grow, and having all these insects that live in the soil – I find this more rewarding than having a giant space with just grass and like two species of bird and nothing else, you know," Tye says.
“The whole ‘gardens are an ever-changing' thing is so true ... what you've got now is not what you've got in a year. You might change some things, they’ll work for a while, and then the soil will change and make way for different plants and different things."
As a horticulturist, Tye has a passion for creating native gardens through his backyard habitat project. He aims to create environments that wildlife love to visit, and he has possums, black cockatoos and bower bird nests in his backyard to show for it.
“I built part of the garden up for lizards, and within a year we had blue tongues and water skinks in there. In the summer, it's so good, you pull up in the afternoon after being at work and there's just all these lizards sitting there. And you think, this is what it's meant to be like,” Tye says.
“The garden does well. It fills up with flowers and there's usually lots of little flying insects, so it's quite busy. But that's kind of what I like. I feel if there's lots of things happening in your garden and it's busy, then it's more alive."
Tye keeps a close eye on pollinators and small invertebrates he sees in his garden – last year he counted 22 insect species on a single flowering plant.
“I find all the little things quite interesting, getting right down close… I’ll find a random little spider and be trying to get a macro shot so I can work out what kind of spider it is. It's all stuff like that, paying attention. Building an ecosystem from the ground up.”
Tye hopes to teach visitors his philosophy on bird life in the garden.
"It's easy to go to lots of gardens and see the same old things in terms of wildlife. It might just be noisy mynas or peewees or the odd magpie if you’ve got a big lawn," he says.
''My approach is a little bit different to the classic ‘plant a bottle brush and you'll have so many colourful birds’. It's like, well, you have four colourful birds. But if you do it this way, you might still see those colourful birds, just not as frequently, but you'll also see ones you might never have seen.
"A lot of the other birds kind of get left behind and in some regards, for people that are growing lots of food, the birds that people are leaving behind are probably the most beneficial to them. A lot of those little birds that you don't see in suburban areas anymore are all the ones eating tiny little insects that cause damage to your plants."
Tye’s garden will be open for visitors on November 22 and 23.
“I'm hoping that people's biggest takeaway is what the diversity can be like if they plant native, even if it’s just a patch of their garden, potentially they could see more native pollinators than they even knew existed."
Early bird tickets are on sale until September 30.
● Adults (17+): $20
● Concession: $12
For more information, visit the website or book tickets via Humanitix.
Funds raised through ticket sales and sponsorship by Gilly’s Kitchen Garden cover the costs of the event. The Illawarra Edible Garden Trail is proudly funded by Healthy Cities Illawarra and Food Fairness Illawarra, and sponsored by Gilly’s Kitchen Garden, which is supporting this grassroots community celebration of sustainable growing and biodiversity.
