26/08/2026
There has been so much happening in my garden in the lead-up to spring.
The carpenter bees are busy preparing for a new season, excavating nests in a dead section of my Banksia ericifolia. I’ve also had three visits in as many weeks from Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos. First feeding on seeds from my Banksias, and most recently tearing into my Casuarina in search of wood-boring grubs. Knowing they are foraging for grubs for the first time in my garden is pretty incredible.
Meanwhile, my regular pair of Little Wattlebirds have been working tirelessly over the past four weeks raising another chick, which looks like it is now very close to successfully fledging.
What I love most about all of this is that my native garden really isn’t very big. It’s just a thin sliver of habitat surrounded by suburbia that I started completely from scratch. Yet it’s unbelievable how much native wildlife has found and made use of it, whether for food, nesting material, shelter or somewhere to raise the next generation.
It makes you wonder what our suburbs could look like if every home had even a small patch of native habitat. A few locally native trees, shrubs and flowering plants might not seem like much on their own, but collectively they could create an enormous network of habitat for the wildlife trying to survive alongside us.
You really don’t need a huge property to make a difference.
