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About this site

  at 2:44 pm

About Site B - My Subtropical Garden Adventures

All the hard work elimated for easy researching Site B - My Subtropical Garden Adventures is a record of my gardening activities which started at the beginning of 2015 but recorded from August onward. I will endeavour to keep records of new plant species added to my garden; their progress and growth rates; what I add to the soil as top dressing/fertilizer; how the wildlife interacts with these plants; any collection of seeds I gather from these plants; how I germinate the seeds or any cuttings I take; and basically anything else that involves gardening activities.

As an avid gardener I will also endeavour to find and purchase local indigenous plants for/of the Tenterfield, NSW area. When I am not actually gardening I will be doing exhaustive research to identify plant species known to grow in this immediate area, or have been known to grow here in the past but no longer exist. Such information can probably only be found on the internet and in really old books.

Any known records of plant species will also be added to this site as a form of reference in a PDF format.

It is my hope to at least keep a record on this site of all existing and extinct flora species of the Tenterfield area, so that these species can be revegetated into the area again somehow.

With limited access to available land to revegetate plant species myself I have to do further research to identify key places and individuals, that will accept seedlings of said flora on private properties, probably as donations from myself. Tenterfield has basically been stripped of most of it's native flora for the passed 200 years, except for Eucalypts, Wattles, and some other native plants. A huge amount of exotic plants now exist in the area, including exotic grasses.

I am focusing mostly on establishing indigenous plants in the area at a slow but steady pace over time, starting with my own garden and spreading out from there. In time I hope to breed many indigenous species via seed when my plants are mature enough and make them available to the general public. Before I do that I will have to localise these species and hope they adapt to Tenterfield' s weather and environment.

By growing plants in a frost hollow region with temperatures that drop down to -10 degrees Celcius or more, stronger and more durable plants can be grown in the immediate area. The plants in which I will endeavour to grow will either survive or die from all known environment conditions of the area. If they survive then their species will be able to survive anywhere in the area of Tenterfield.

About my Community Commitments

To help reintroduce indigenous plant species back into the Tenterfield, NSW area.

About my team

It's just me..

Shirley Hardy (avid gardener and bird watcher)

Shirley grew up in the harsh arid climates of South Australia where native flora was stripped from the landscape at every given opportunity by numerous property owners.

Why am I interested in the local flora?

In the early days of my interest in plants, in my youth, I discovered my passion for normal, exotic fig trees and how Sulphur-crested Cockatoos and Galahs ate the figs from the tree. As a teenager I grew up along the River Murray and was used to seeing large birds like Pelicans, Swans, and Suplhur-crested Cockatoos up close every day. Years later I moved to Tenterfield, NSW, (late 1995) and was overwhelmed by the amount of plant life and birds species here. I was so overwhelmed by it all that I began researching and identifying many of the bird species here. Unfortunately, over time, those species began to disappear as the rain began to disappear. The plant life remained minus a few trees here and there thanks to them being cut down for various reasons. As even more time progressed, an additional interest began, to identify what plants the birds would visit each day and if they were exotic plants or not, and my interest in the intricate balance between nature, plants, birds and insects was born.

Researching all of this was exhausting over time but so rewarding as I have discovered an unknown bird species in Tenterfield that I still cannot identify and unfortunately no photographs of it either. I also discovered a Wattle tree mutation that reinvented itself to ward of an invasion of catepillers, that began producing blue flowers and Melaleuca like seed pods. However, that Wattle tree had been cut down by a previous owner of the property (apartment)I am renting. The potential for all plant species to adapt and change in Tenterfield is huge, with the potential for new subspecies to emerge if given the chance to just grow here.

'If you are the 3rd or 4th to jump on the bandwagon, then you will falter.
You need to create the bandwagon...' -Todd Layt
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