Nudgee Verge Garden for Pollinators
This month we visited a verge garden with lots of biodiversity and habitat packed into a small space. Thank you to Brendan for hosting, and for the detailed plant list.
For our October 2025 verge visit, we visited Brendan’s verge garden at Nudgee. Every verge reflects the priorities of the gardener. For Brendan, it is pollinators. We met Brendan in 2023 when he came to a working bee to see what the Shady Lanes Banyo verge garden project was about.
The Banyo group project inspired Brendan to start his own verge garden - see this post and early photo in August 2023. Below is his report of this month’s visit, showing how much can be achieved in a short time.
Build it and they will come
The discordant cries of the channel-billed cuckoos filling the airwaves is an indication that spring has finally arrived in Brisbane. Down below, on the pollinator garden patch on my Nudgee verge, spring was dancing to the beat of a different drum: common grass blue butterflies and meadow arguses gliding in out of the groundcovers. This iteration of the Shady Lanes project takes a close look at how to optimise your space to bump up pollinator numbers in our suburbs.
The butterflies in this patch are a portent of things to come. I describe the gardening style applied to this verge as maximalist - planting out almost every square inch of space. Each plant plays its own particular role in attracting different types of insects and other wildlife into the garden through the provision of micro habitat structure and/or as a food source. You never really know what eventually is going to be utilised by new visitors, so why not hedge your bets?
This approach has already begun to reap dividends. Pink tongue (Rostellularia obtusa), was planted from the get go. This plant naturally self seeds, functions as a filler in the design, and serves as the host plant for the spectacular blue argus. Their masses of blooms open later in the day and are visited by countless insects such as hoverflies, bees and other butterfly species. The blue arguses have not been sighted in this neck of the woods yet, but that’s not to say they won’t ever come.
Lamentably, we live in the midst of the insect apocalypse with international studies and the ‘windscreen phenomenon’ demonstrating decreases of 75%-80% in insect numbers in the last few decades. By planting out your verge you are playing a small but vital role in rebuilding their numbers to preserve the food chain which ultimately helps humans to survive. The time to plant is now!
Initially, I sought to design a verge garden which utilised a limited colour palette to complement the house: white flowers and silver foliage were going to form the backbone. A Grevillea banksia alba was already reaching out over the white picket fence which aptly fulfilled the requirements. However, a visit to my local native nursery quickly put paid to those lofty ideals. The availability of native groundcover species trumped any notion of adhering to a colour palette.
The preservation of sight lines was also one of the requirements I set for myself, as there is a moderate amount of foot and motor traffic on my street. This meant that ground covers were also going to largely determine the design. Some plants didn’t behave as expected.
I thought it was lucky when I sourced a white flowering everlasting daisy variety (Xerochrysum bracteatum). But it didn’t take long for the species to totally dominate the garden and displace other more appropriate plants. The white daisies grew to eye level, shaded out other plants, and obstructed sight lines - it had to go! Today, a smaller golden flowering form persists on the verge and does a good job at attracting Rutherglen bugs, flies (also important pollinators) and even a hummingbird hawk moth. Nailing the perfect verge garden is difficult to achieve - it is a game of trial and error.
At the end of the tour of the verge, we looked at some other successes: Darling pea (Swainsona galegifolia) (native bees and host plant to the common grass blue butterfly), Fan flower (Scaevola aemula), dune fan flower (Scaevola caledulacea) (host plant for the meadow argus), swamp mazus (Mazus pumilio), Australian rush (Juncus usitatus) (a favoured sleeping perch for the neon cloak and dagger bees), Westringia fruticosa ‘Zena’, and native parsnip (Trachymene incisa), because it has white flowers and attracts a lot of pollinators.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of available information. There aren’t any right or wrong answers when creating a verge garden. The garden will change over time no matter what. Just know that the type of plant you select will determine whether your verge will be high or low maintenance. But the most important thing is to give it a crack and lend a helping hand to your local insects.
Plant List
I use an iNaturalist Project to track who’s been visiting my verge and home garden and urge you all to do the same. See: Your Home · iNaturalist
Thank you to Brendan for hosting this month. We were all inspired by the diversity of plants and how much difference just a small patch can make. It was also good to meet up with Donna again and check her verge garden further down the street. All these small patches add up and it’s a great way to get to bring neighbours together.
This verge is in the Brisbane City Council area. See Brisbane’s policy here.
Please use the comments below for questions about this verge or the plants.
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Love this approach to the verge. So lush and full of colour and life. Also amazing to see one so neat even without a concrete path to define the edges.
Hey Jenny, that Senna we were looking at on Brendan's verge was Senna artemisioides. The one I have in my garden is Senna acclinis.