Sustainable gardening ideas in Australia

If you plan to make your outdoor spaces from sustainable gardening in the long term, the most important thing is to have someone in the know to bounce your ideas off - either a landscape architect/designer or landscape gardener, who can tell you which of your green ideas are practical and which aren't.

"Consultation is an important process for the designer and the client to go through to get to understand one another," says Ian Lyell of Ian Lyell Design.

"The client tells the designer what they want in a brief; the designer interprets those ideas and uses his or her expertise to determine what's best for the site and to come up with plans accordingly."

Sustainable gardening takes time and patience

If a client came to Ian wanting a sustainable garden, one of the first things he would advise is that all plants, whether native or exotic, need a certain period of watering before they are established.

"It's a myth that you can just plant a native garden and it will grow without watering," says Ian. "They always need the moisture kept up to them initially, whether they're native or exotic, drought tolerant or not."

Installing permanent drip irrigation systems

Ian acknowledges that native plants tend to survive best on minimal watering in the long term, but also points out that various exotic species, especially from the Mediterranean and other arid parts of the world, work well in dry conditions too. He believes that a good balance between the two is best, serviced by sensible - that is, not extravagant - watering.

He hopes in the future to see more home irrigation systems using runoff water from storage tanks, but thinks that some council regulations currently may make the overall process prohibitively time consuming, and therefore not suitable for everyone.

All of which just goes to show that the best way to work out what will suit your outdoor spaces is to consult a professional. Bring your green ideas to the consultation table and you'll go a long way to ending up with a beautiful garden as well as a sustainable one.

Contact a landscape designer like Ian to find out more about sustainable gardening: