One of the chief delights of a garden is the exquisite music and movement brought by little birds, like gleaming jewels amongst the greenery. Of course all birds are welcome visitors (except maybe the rampaging mobs of Sulphur Crested Cockys) but little birds are special treats - that reward quiet observation.
Our Blue Mountain’s garden is teeming with small birds! At the moment we are especially enjoying the duets of the resident Eastern Whipbirds, the flirtatious trills of Super Fairy Wrens and the Eastern Spinebills piping.
Birdlife is reminder that our gardens are part of nature, and connected to the wider ecosystem. What we plant in our gardens matters.
Most of the advice online regarding attracting small birds into ones yard emphasises native plants - which obviously makes sense. Plants that form native habitat - species endemic to your particular area - are going to be the best choice if attracting birds and wildlife is your only priority. But realistically gardening is full of compromises and you are most likely juggling other priorities in designing your garden.
There may be many, very good reasons why you might not want a strictly native garden.
Gardens are intensely personal, For me the emotional resonance I have with traditional cottage plants, I feel comes from fairy stories and books I was read to as a child, and my grandmother telling me of foraging for wild strawberries is the Carpathian Mountains and my family’s garden in Romania. The softness, nostalgia and romance that foxgloves, aquilegias and roses evoke to me are completely different from my emotional response to a native garden. I have a scientific fascination with native plants, delight in their intricate forms and incredible adaptations to the harsh Australian climate and survival over eons. However if I am to be honest much of the aussie bush to me, has a sublime yet menacing wildness to it. The vastness, combined with the oceans of time it has persisted unchanged, fills me with awe when out bushwalking, yet those emotions are not what I want to conjure when sipping my morning cup of tea. A garden planted to simulate the bush would not feel soft and welcoming to me.
A native garden might clash with your home’s architecture and character, especially period homes. Being surrounded by bush or farmland can make the desire to create a lush oasis, your own little eden of your favourite shrubs and perennials even stronger.
Fire risk is also another good reason to avoid a native garden around your house as exotic plants are typically less flammable. Eucalypts, tea trees and paperbarks have volatile oils (conifers also), and often have stringy fibrous bark, or bark that sheds in ribbons that makes them high flammable. Plants such as camellias and roses and most exotics trees and shrubs have leaves with high water content and low in volatile oils, which makes them fire retarding (of course only if they are able to be well watered in the periods of drought which usually precede major fires).
Many “native gardens” are actually planted with introduced species that are not at all endemic to the area - most native plants at nurseries are either from Western Australia or cultivars, grown for their showier flowers.
Deciduous trees in particular are so valuable in the garden for allowing Winter sunshine when you need it most and provided shade in the heat of Summer.
You may want to grow an edible garden, with herbs, vegetables and fruit trees or a garden along permaculture principles. Or perhaps growing flowers to cut for bouquets for the house and to give to friends is ‘a must’ for your garden.
And I could go on…
Of course there is no reason, apart from ideological puritanism, why you can't successfully have a mix of exotic plantings and native species.
So how to incorporate habitat and food for small birds into your garden, while keeping it looking like a garden? Instead of just wild scrub?
And can you have a garden, that is primarily exotic plants, that still attracts and provides habitat for wild life?
You can have an exotic garden close to the house (including some native plants that complement) and have native wilder areas of the garden at the back or closer to the perimeter of your property. This is exactly what we have done and it gives us the best of both worlds.
While the back of our garden has native trees, eucalypts, various wattles and blueberry ash trees, the rest of our block, I would say is 99% exotic species. I do have some native plants such as Correa glabra, Lythrum salicaria and Philotheca myoporoides tucked in amoungst the roses, but the rest are all exotic. Although, of course, it is possible that a garden planted all with natives would attract even more birdlife, our garden is teeming with birds and there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of birds since we have removed most of the grass and put in mixed borders. You could also have a pocket or corner of native plants as a wildlife sanctuary, while also adapting your exotic planting to take on some of the principles of planting for encouraging small birds.
Below is a great diagram produced by the Habitat Network showing how to create a small bird haven in your garden. Including a designated small bird sanctuary in your yard like this would be ideal. However I also believe you can adapt some of the principles to a mixed exotic border to make that attractive to small birds too.
I have adapted some of the advice relating to attracting small birds and see that the principles work with native and exotic species alike.
Key Tips to Attract Small Birds
Encourage insects & don’t use pesticides, even organic ones.
Many small birds are insectivores, and the Silver Eyes and Striated Thornbills in particular swarm to our Japanese Maple and my rose bushes in early spring to feast on the rapidly multiplying aphids. If I sprayed with Neem oil, while organic, I would be depriving these birds of their meal! And while the small amount of insecticide consumed in those insects ma not kill the birds it may effect their nervous and reproductive system. (Also, I personally find thrips a much more damaging pest of my roses, than aphids ever are. The natural predators of thrips such as lacewings, ladybird larvae and parasitoid wasps are also attracted to aphids and so I find that allowing aphids prevent thrips from getting to plague proportions.
This also means choosing the right plants for your soil and conditions, so that your plants have the best possible chance to be healthy and so will be more resistant against pest and diseases so you don’t have to resort to sprays, even organic ones.
Hedges
Small birds need dense multi-layered vegetation for protection from predators, such as cats and foxes and larger carnivorous birds like currawongs and butcherbirds, as well as from larger species such as Red Wattle birds that can be aggressive competitors for food.
Wide and long evergreen hedges can provide the foundation of this protective habitat. Because of regular trimming hedges produce dense foliage that provides great sanctuary for small birds. You don’t want too dense though- as birds will need to be able to enter, think Camellia sasanqua or Viburnum hedges as opposed to the very tight hedges created with Buxus and Yew. There were no hedges when we moved in, and a lot less birds in general but barely any small birds. Now that the garden has been in the main planted and is getting established, by observing the behaviour of the birds in our garden, and how much time they spend in the thick cover of the hedges, I really believe that in our garden our hedges have been key to attracting and providing habitat for small birds.
The Viburnum tinus and Pittosporum ‘Green Pillar’ hedges provide consistent shelter for small birds, who I frequently see flitting from hedge to garden and back again. The hedges act as safe little tunnels for small birds to travel along! The Eastern Whipbirds especially seem to spend a lot of time within the hedges, as they are quite furtive. They emerge to scratch and burrow in fallen leaves. The White Browed Scrubwrens also love hanging out in the hedges. Some great native plants for hedges would be Eleocarpus reticulatus, Prostanthera rotundifolia and Correa glabra or C.alba.
In our garden, along the Viburnum tinus hedges are planted Clematis plants (C. montana and some viticella hybrids). Plants such as clematis growing over a hedge provides even more protection for little birds within. Hardenbergia violacea would be an ideal native plant to do that same.
Spiky Shrubs
Densely planted mixed borders within the hedges provide more shelter and food for the small birds. The planting should ideally be mixed, as in a mixture of evergreen shrubs and herbaceous plants to provide shelter year round. The standard advice is to include lots of spikey shrubs which further protect small birds from larger bully birds. So if you are planting a native garden this could be things like Lambertia formosa, Grevillea acanthifolia, spikey Hakeas (Hakea sericea, Hakea teretifolia) and spiney Acacias (Acacia ulicifolia).
In my garden the many, many roses (over fifty now) fulfil this same function. They also attract lots of insects (aphids, lady beetles, caterpillars etc) that small birds like to glean. Birds also like to eat the rosehips in the winter. I see little birds on all of my rose bushes, but I especially see them flitting in and out of the Cecile Brunner that is climbing up the old dunny. My Rosa ‘Ballerina’ is a favourite with the bees and the birds eat the hips. However most of my roses are fully double roses, which while attractive to pollinators, offers them nothing, with no way to access pollen or nectar. To attract pollinators you should choose, semi-double roses, such as R. Celsiana or simple open flowered roses such as Rugosa hybrids or David Austin’s Tottering-by-Gently with its incredibly charming sprays of large soft primrose roses. My Jude the Obscure, Desdemona and Scepter’d Isle roses also will open to show their stamens.
Eastern Spinebill by Henrik Gronvold (1858 - 1940)
Replace lawn with diverse shrubs and plants.
Of course you can have some lawn, but perhaps you don’t need all of it? Digging up the lawn (or lasagna gardening to replace it) also means less mowing, so hopefully more time sitting in the garden watching the birds, or sipping on a cool drink nestled in beside your new flowering shrubs, instead of pushing around the mower in the heat of summer.
Replace the lawn monoculture with a real variety of plants. Think in terms of diverse plant families to support a diverse ecosystem of insect and bird life. Lots of little birds love the nectar that the Lamiaceae family (the mint family) provides (Salvias, lavender, rosemary etc.) The rutaceae family (citrus family) supports a diverse collection of butterfly larvae, with Boronia, Correas, Croweas or in exotics lemon or lime trees and Choisya and Murraya. Include some native grasses for seed eating small birds like Red Browed finches. Non-invasive exotic grasses are usually OK to plant because they don’t produce viable seed or seed is greatly reduced, so I don’t believe they would provide much in the way of food to little birds.
I also notice the little birds such as Superb Fairy Wrens and Eastern Spinebills love to perch on the branches of small trees to sing- a favourite is my Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy.’ Perhaps its branches are just the right height as a platform? You want a garden with a diversity of layers - instead of a single layer like bedding plants, think small understory trees, tall shrubs, small shrubs, herbaceous perennials and grasses and bulbs.
Nectar and Seed Sources
Nectar eaters like Eastern Spinebills love plants with tubular or bell shaped flowers including foxgloves, Agastache, Correas, Kangaroo Paws, Penstemon cultivars, (favourites of mine are Purple Bedder and Alice Hindley). Planting Salvias that flower across different seasons are sure ways to attract small birds, such as Salvia ‘Meighan’s Magic’ and Salvia leucantha cultivars.
Prioritise small flowers over very showy hybrid callistemons and grevilleas that often attract birds such as noisy miners instead of small birds.
Male Superb Fair Wrens hold yellow petals in their mouths (to offset their blue plumage one assumes) as part of their courtship display, so having some bright yellow flowers might help attract them to your garden.
Native species that harmonise very well with cottage garden style and exotic perennials
Indigofera australis
Brachyscome
Correas
Crowea
Philotheca myoropoides
Seed Sources
Native Grasses such as Poa labillardieri, Poa poiformis, Microlaena stipoides
Acacias (ensure they are acacias endemic to our local area) In the Blue Mountains around Blackheath species such as Acacia terminalis, Acacia elata.
A list of some exotic plants that attract small birds
Aquilegia
Agastache
Penstemon
Digitalis (Foxgloves)
Monarda
Lupin
Heuchera
Lavendula spp.
Salvia cvs. such as ‘Meighan’s Magic’ S. Leucantha cvs. S.guaranatica cvs. etc
Don’t plant noxious or environmental weeds
I have seem some bird attracting guides online that recommend plants like Cotoneaster and Cherry Laurel and even Lantana. While it may be tempting to plant species like these because their fruit is enjoyed by birds, because these noxious weeds are spread by birds and can invade natural areas it is vitally important that these plants are not planted.
Invasive species you should avoid:
Buddleja davidii, Cytisus (Brooms), Blackberry, Berberis, Holly, Lantana, Ligustrum spp. (Privet), Prunus laurocerasus (Cherry Laurel)
Check with your local council - they should have a noxious weed list for your local area and make sure to avoid planting these species. Even native plants can be weeds when they are planted in areas the are not endemic to, such as the Cootamundra Wattle.
Of course, if you plant exotic species, control their spread (with judicious deadheading, not allowing them to go to seed) to make sure they do not escape your garden.
An important note on removing large weedy areas from your garden. If your garden is very weedy and overgrown it may seem like the best thing to do is to hack into this as soon as possible and replace it. However weedy thickets are often spots that small birds may be nesting and finding shelter. So for our little bird friends the best thing to do would be to establish some other non-weedy habitat for them first, observe them using it before you clear thickets of privet and honeysuckle etc.
Bird Baths
Cleaned and filled with fresh water daily and ideally elevated so that that birds feel safe away from cats and dogs. I see little birds and bigger birds alike enjoying our birds baths.
BIRDS WHO FREQUENT OUR GARDEN
I have a few very blurry photos of the little birds in our garden, but mostly I do not try to photograph them, but just enjoy watching them. Apologies for the lack of accompanying bird photos!
Little Guys
Silver Eyes
Eastern Spinebill
White-throated Treecreeper
Eastern Whipbird
White Browed Scrubwren
Superb Fairy Wren
Eastern Yellow Robin
Red-Whiskered Bulbul
Brown Thornbill
Striated Thornbill
Big Guys
Crimson Rosella
Sulpher Crested Cockatoo
Satin Bower bird
King Parrot
Red Wattle bird
Kookaburra
Lewin’s Honeyeater
Eastern Koel
Wonga Pigeon
Brown Cuckoo-Dove
Gang Gang
Magpies
Pied Curawong
We also often hear the Boobook at night.
