Natives

We wanted natives in our front garden, to attract the native wildlife and help replace some of the native bush that's been lost around the area.

Things that have done well:

• Mypoporum - groundcovers are very vigorous and the surrounding plants seem to benefit from it. There's even a climber-ish form and a tree too, I'll have to get the scientific names. All cuttings seem to take pretty easily. They're all doing okay-ish in our garden, except the groundcovers seemed to suffer in summer when they didn't have any shade from the sun. We put a climber one in a self-watering pot, I think that wasn't such a good idea on hindsight.

• Grevillea olivacea - fast-growing, dense tall shrub, great as screening plant. Looks beautiful too. Of all the natoves in our garden, it's probably one of the hardiest. The smaller native birds love these ones because they're so dense.

• Wedding bushes - pretty, tall shrub with beautiful scented white flowers. Tends to get attacked by scale insects at times - spray of neem oil seems to help control them.

• Kennedia/Running postman - fast-growing groundcover vine. It died back quite a bit in the heat of summer, but it's springing back quickly in winter.

• Hardenbergias - Fast-growing climber with beautiful leaves and flowers. Super hardy. We hung chicken wire from the fence cap and let them grow up on the fence, it definitely livens up the fence and the narrow walkway along the rear side of the house. We bought some pink ones but they've been ravaged by grasshoppers, they're still alive but need a while to settle in.

• Grevilleas - crithmifolia has done pretty well, and in quite full sun. It did get a bit of the borers (see Woolybushes) but hasn't been attacked much.

Not so well:

• Banksias - we've tried a few types and they're very susceptible to root rot. I recently bought one that grows in swampy soil and put him in a pot, he seems to be pretty okay. Apart from the fact that he grows up to 12m.

• Boronias - seems like gardeners have quite some trouble with these ones. We had a chocolate one that thrived for a bit, then suddenly died, I reckon it was root rot. We have two aniseed boronias, one was seriously attacked by scale insects and has seemed to be in some kind of strange stasis since then. The other was recently attacked, I pruned it back hard and gave it a spray with neem oil, it seems to be working.

• Woolybushes - We love the look of these plants and they make great screening plants. They also have flowers which the native birbs seem to love. However, they tend to get attacked by borers (I think) - we haven't seen the actual insects, but we've noticed some fluffy brown buildup around the stems, and when we scraped it off sometimes there was a hole in the stem. We had one plant which we'd let the brown stuff build up and it ended up dead. I regularly inspect them and whenever I see the brown stuff build up around the stem, I hose it off with a jet of water, that seems to keep them under control.

• Leschenaultias - Pretty flowers, but we can't seem to keep them alive unfortunately.

Trees

Silver princess (Simone), Hakea laurina (Larry), Coral gum (Corey) -

We'd got them all as tubestock and it's been a joy watching them grow up. Simone especially, when she was younger her leaves were round and the new growth was bright red, it was stunning. Corey's been attacked by some fungus and some kind of mites, we've thinned him out a bit and put some fungicide on him. Fingers crossed.