Nature strips are goldmines of opportunity

Nature strips, or verges, are generally understood to be the land between your front fence and the kerb and normally consist of a combination of dirt, grass, weeds and trees.

These are strange in-between spaces and for decades the general behaviour towards this land has been to either ignore it or treat it carelessly.

Nature strips store our utilities, are the only public space where residents are expected to help the council with maintenance and take up an enormous area; in Melbourne, they make up 7% of total land, which is almost 360 acres in the City of Port Phillip alone!

Now, with cities growing, biodiversity declining at an alarming rate, climate change in full swing and many developers and councils doing so little (so often prioritising profits over immediate and imminent environmental issues), this land is finally emerging as something valuable. Valuable not because of what it is but because of what it can be. These spaces are goldmines of positive change because street gardening can happen in them.

Here, residents have an immense opportunity to turn these degraded pieces of public land into beacons of hope, peace, health and joy, while fighting climate change and embedded carelessness.

What is street gardening?

Street gardening for me is the following: creating a garden in a public space (often by a resident outside their home) combining site awareness, observation and immersion with a particularly determined, generous, positive and community-centred mindset.

This mindset is so important – time and time again I have seen that you don’t need to be a great gardener to be a great street gardener. Street gardening is completely different to gardening on private land and there are plenty of challenges – I call it “the wild west of gardening”! But, with the right mindset, these challenges can be turned around.

Think HEART:

Humans are a part of nature, not above it.

Everyone’s garden, not yours.

Always focus on the awesome.

Remove dog poo and move on!

Treat others (and their doggies) the way you want the garden to be treated.

Street gardening is about taking positive action within council constraints and building community pressure to create change. Though many councils are woefully behind the times, most have nature strip guidelines and most of these allow some kind of street gardening.

The power of street gardening

Street gardening with this mindset has immense power and the power lies in connections – large to minuscule – gradually strengthening community, critters and environment. Nature strips run alongside footpaths connecting larger green spaces. One small well-kept street garden has the power to give people and their communities more connection to the land they live on.

One person has the power to connect to hundreds of passers-by. The right flowers have the power to connect insects of the same species, strengthening genetics. The connection of soil to plant roots increases soil health, which then has the power to connect to the health of everything. It’s so awesome!
The benefits of these connections in street gardening are immense and include:

• Building and deepening community
• Fighting climate change through addressing urban environmental issues such as the heat island effect and water retention issues
• Increasing biodiversity and supporting local ecosystems
• Increasing the value of your home
• Decreasing crime (e.g. graffiti)
• Increasing psychological safety

The Heart Gardening Project

I started street gardening in 2016 out the front of our rental and things grew from there. In 2019, I founded The Heart Gardening Project, a community initiative that joyfully connects humans to nature through street gardening. At this point, we have helped to create over 70 street gardens, planted over 6,000 plants and given away over 600.

Over the years, with the help of over 30 scientists and specialists, we have focussed on creating habitat for our native pollinating insects, such as bees, butterflies, moths, wasps and flies. Why? They are fascinating, gorgeous and vital to our food security (without them our ecosystems would collapse). Their populations are plummeting, nature strips can easily create havens for them and successful habitat can be created within most council guidelines.

Melbourne Pollinator Corridor

Now, after two years of design and set up (including writing a book), we are creating and rolling out the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor, which will be an 8km community-led and maintained wildlife corridor for our native pollinating insects, linking the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne to Westgate Park. We are aiming for 18,000 indigenous plants in 200 gardens by the end of 2024. To our knowledge this is an Australian first, so creating this project also creates a precedent from which we can learn and grow, and help others to take positive action to support their local biodiversity. I know this project is completely doable if we continue to focus on caring for our country and community one street garden, one street gardener at a time.

Written by Emma Cutting, founder of The Heart Gardening Project and author.