First steps in creating a wildlife garden

A Project Plan and a BioBlitz

November 2024

An excerpt from the project plan

Not many people write a business case before they undertake weeding. I think that is very reasonable, but I am a planner. I have written several bush restoration project documents and in writing a project plan for my new garden, I collected all the information I needed to consider in one place — location, landscape, ecological environment — and helped me focus my intention and actions in order to achieve the outcome I want.

Number one on that list of actions is:

1. Need to identify and map native and non-native plants within the garden that provide wildlife benefit.

Why would I do that? There's a lot of existing plants in the garden and this will help determine what I want to keep and what will need to be removed. The idea is to improve the garden, not create a completely new one, and to maximise the wildlife benefit. A mature non-native tree offers more to wildlife than a newly planted native.

How would I do that? This is the fun part. When I was being trained by the amazing people at Kaipātiki Project to run bush restoration projects, they introduced me to iNaturalist. This is a worldwide, online, naturalist’s resource and Aotearoa New Zealand has its own offshoot — iNaturalist NZ — Mātaki Taiao. It allows you online access to a community of people better than you at identifying wild plants, fungi, birds, creepy crawlies, etc that you might come across. You take some pics on your phone, upload them via their app or website and people will pile on and tell you what you have been looking at. For a lot of living things, their AI is pretty good at identifying it too.

An iNaturalist observation from the old house

I used iNaturalist extensively to catalogue the bush reserve I volunteered at, both to understand what was there originally and to record changes over time. As I have learned more about New Zealand wildlife, I have identified other people’s observations. I am a fan and I heartily recommend it to anyone with a curiosity about the nature around them.

To see what I had in the garden, I bioblitzed it over a couple of weeks. A bioblitz is basically the intensive recording of natural observations. There are even national and international bioblitz competitions on iNaturalist that my city of Auckland traditionally does terribly at. Indeed, the first weekend of mapping my garden coincided with the Great Southern BioBlitz, a southern hemisphere competition, so my flooding of records onto the site was well timed and meant Auckland did slightly less badly than normal.

The Great Southern BioBlitz results illustrating Auckland's failure

I was hoping to find something astonishing in amongst the bush, but there were few surprises. It turns out I have a lot of native trees. Trees, but not the native understorey you would expect. Instead there is bare earth, which is no good for water conservation, erosion or wildlife. There are also environmental weeds of wild ginger, elaeagnus, monkey apple, bangalow palm and tree privet. These are the same weeds I find in local reserves, but here in the garden a lot were intentionally grown. Auckland is known as “the world’s weediest city” and that is largely because of the number of garden plants that are naturalising. Where I live is close to what are called “high value” bush areas — that is, remnants of old growth forest and rare ecosystems — and it matters what weeds are seeding from my garden. Naturally you would have known this earlier if you’d read the project plan. It’s all in there.

There are precious few nectar flowers either. I had more in my small garden beds at the old house than in all this huge plot of land has to offer. Not a great start for a butterfly garden.

Still, I now know what I have to work with and what I have to work against. On to step 2.