Tardissing the Space Part 7 – Verge gardening

One of the attractions of this place when we bought it was the verge and the lane. They removed the sense of having to keep elbows in and made the little 500m² block feel twice its size. At first I just envisaged using the overhang, planting food forest right up to the boundary and harvesting sun over the footpath and the lane. But very quickly, I started to see the potential in gardening the verge.

My laneway verge gardening now extends nearly 100 metres down the lane, and I have designs on it all the way to its end. The front verge has no less than … let me count them – lemon myrtle, bay, blueberry, cumquat, makrut lime, gramichama, guava, lemon, lime, mandarin, blood orange, Navelina orange, feijoa, fig, carambola, pomegranate, olive, apple, pear, mango, avocado, macadamia – 22 types of edible bearing tree, a few of them with more than one, with a dozen tamarillo trees as a nursery crop and an understory of coffee trees, herbs, and in summer pumpkins grown for leaves that the African neighbours harvest as a green veg.

Down the much narrower laneway verge I have mango, avocado, mulberry, paw paws, one surviving tamarind, several seedling citrus (that I plan to graft on to), chilis, and on the sunny north facing side, against the colourbond fence of a unit block that backs onto the lane, I pant every pineapple top I come across.

I’m lucky. Our front verge is wide – 8 metres from our front boundary to the kerb – and the street is so wide and quiet that it’s loved by learner drivers practicing three point turns and reverse parking. The laneway down the south side of the house is narrow and only has a metre of weedy soil edging the tarred surface but it has almost no traffic. It may one day be widened, so I’m reluctant to plant expensive trees, but it may not too, so there’s a chance the seedling mangoes and avocadoes and the one surviving tamarind will outlive me.

The design criteria for verge planting share some of the same principles as private site planting – aspect is key – tall things to the south, short things to the north, stack and layer. So long as you manage the light source like this, the limiting factors are soil nutrients and water, and if you can provide enough of those, you can plant very densely and create a forest environment where the ground is in complete shade, which eliminates weeding. Trees in suburbia need a lot of pruning to keep them to suburban size, and it is not couth to allow pests like fruit fly a breeding environment, whether on private or public land.

But verge gardening also brings in a whole nuther set of design considerations. A key insight of permaculture thinking is that there is no such thing as “side effects”. Everything has multiple effects. Everything exists in a networked ecology of interdependencies, ripples, cascades and risk insurance redundancies. So verge gardening has to be looked at as a sector analysis that takes account of all the “wild energies” of “the public”, and some of them are quite wild.

Council has responsibility for the verge, and council staff have interests too. They need and value access to water, stormwater, sewer and any other underground services without having to dig up trees. They want the street lighting respected, and no tall trees threatening overhead services. But the main one is freedom from unwelcome work of dealing with complaints. So part of verge garden design is to design in a way to catch potential complaints before they go near council.

Folk walk and drive along our road. That means they need and value a nice, mown, bindi-eye free, preferably shady footpath, wide enough to walk two abreast, with no prickly or scratchy branches intruding, no trip hazards, no mobility scooter traps. They need and value being be able to park a car in shade, but without risk of falling branches or fruit, and alight from the car without landing in a garden bed or opening the car door into a tree. They value being able to pick fruit and herbs, and with a little induction they can be nudged to see it as an asset worth saving from the “tragedy of the commons”, but one encounter with something that looks edible but is poisonous will send them screaming to council. Some people value tidiness more than others, and connect it with a sense that their community is cared for. The postie likes being able to take a fairly direct route mailbox to mailbox.

The walking and driving though also bring community, with all its joys, right to the doorstep. “Obtain a yield” if I am growing for us means even one bay tree is too many, but in a public space things that many people need in very small quantities are perfect. The verge gardening has been the most wonderful way to meet the neighbours and there’s a thriving gift economy happening. We’ve been gifted green pawpaw salad made with verge pawpaws, and pumpkin leaf based stew made with the pumpkin leaves, locally caught fish and crabs, seeds, seedlings, produce, recipes, local knowledge. And like any networked ecology, it also brings an asset that is never noticed until it is needed – risk insurance. Neighbours looking out for each other. And that’s a yield that’s a bit rare and valuable in testing times.