I'm asking on behalf of friends of mine. They're hoping to establish a medium
density housing village on the outskirts of N'cle. The aim is to make it an
eco-friendly place which makes the best attempt possible at planting native
plant species and providing small habitat pockets for frogs, wetland birds
(backs onto wetland areas), native reptiles and so on.

One of the hopes is to have a sort of 'succession' area to show how one area can
merge into another (eg. wetland into mangrove or wet sclerophyll) This would
contain locally native species with just a few representatives of each. The
*idea* is to have a sort of reference garden that local people can use as a
model in establishing eco-friendly gardens for themselves.

Now, while the overall desire to use indigenous-to-Newcastle species is strong,
I can see a problem in that the end result is not going to be 'pretty' enough to
make it attractive to a lot of people. Sooooo... my first question is: does
anyone have any good ideas of ways to start a native garden and which species
can really add that 'zing' to make people say 'Oh, that's noice, that's
different, that's unusual, I loike that!'

Secondly, *how* do I find out exactly *which* plant species are native to a very
narrow habitat area on the banks of the Hunter River? Nearly everything you can
see is simply RTA plantings, put there to 'restore' the native flora: it has
very little to do with what was there originally!

Hope some of you can help with ideas ...
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Trish {|:-}
Newcastle, NSW, Australia