Now that the verge has been mulched (using free mulch), I’ve started the next phase of my verge project: to populate it with plants.

It begins…
I have a couple of ideas about what I want to do, the only thing in common is what whatever I do shall cost less that $50.0o. Ideally I would like to not spend any money on plantings for a couple of reasons:
- It’s council land not mine, so it could get dug up
- It will occasionally be used for parking, so some of the plantings need to be hardy enough to be driven on
- I don’t have retic out there and it gets pretty hot in summer, so there may be casualties in the green population.
Plus it’s a challenge: do up your verge to make it a productive garden, for no money (or next to no money).
In terms of my ideas about plantings, I have been rolling around 4 mainthemes. The end result will probably be a combination of them:
- Mostly native, preferably WA plants (coastal rosemary, leschnaultia)
- Bush tucker plants (dianella, quandong et al)
- Pollinators/ Flowering plants – the rest of my garden is more productively focused with only the native wisteria, bamboo, liriope and bulbs in the planters around my patio not food producing plants, so some bee attractors would be good
- Purple and/or toning with purple – the non-food producing plants in my garden pretty much all have purple flowers and there is a jacaranda on the verge so something that ties in with that would be nice…(either deep purple flowers or deep green or silver foliage should work)
I pretty much have only 3 rules about gardening: no conifers, no pigface or Disphyma Australe, and no sun jewels (ground cover:Aptenia: Cordifloria & Haeckeliana Cordifloria… (red flower)). DIY Dad started planting these at our beachhouse (acceptable location for them as it’s coastal and I don’t have to see them so often) and given their success up there, he now plants any spare piece of soil with them. Spare pieces of soil include pots, verges and hanging baskets…so he has been told: not.on.my.land.ever.
(NB – DIY Dad also paints the inside of houses yellow, so it’s best not to leave him in your house with a paint brush unsupervised unless you really want to feel like you are living inside a hens’s egg: white ceiling, yellow walls…think about it).
Before I started, I wandered around bunnings to get some ideas and decided I might aim for some of the foll0wing:
- Native rosemary
- Erigeron (seaside daisy) – flowering groundcover
- Lomandra – green spikey grass, will give some height
- Westringia Jervis Gem
- Blue Leschnaultia
- Green kangaroo paw (con: apparently you have to treat most varieties of kangaroo paws like annuals…I want perennials).
Plus there is the grass/reed plant that will need to be eventually moved from the planters around the patio. I could dig it up, section it and then give it a new home on the verge.
My first planting was actually some thyme as a groundcover in the middle of the verge. It had hit critical mass in its pot on the patio, so was time to section it into new homes:

Population explosion
I started by section out a pot of thyme on my patio into 4, replanting 1 of the sections back in the pot and the other three onto the verge:

The verge repopulation project commences phase 2
They are in line with the jacaranda and are low growing plants, so they should sit between the wheels of any cars parking on my verge.
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