This is part 1 of The Garden Guide — the studio's field manual for building a native garden from bare ground in Canberra and the Southern Tablelands. Start at the overview if you've just arrived.
This is first for a reason. Plants have the longest lead time of anything in the garden, and everything else waits on them.
Start this now. It can take six to twelve months to get all the plants you want, especially if anything is being grown to order. Nothing else in this guide takes that long. Start here, then do the soil work while you wait.
Smaller plants are better value
This is the first principle and it does most of the work. A tubestock plant at $3.50 will, within two or three years, catch and often overtake the same species bought as a 140mm pot at $18. It establishes faster because its roots aren't circling a pot, and you can afford five times as many. Buying big is buying impatience.
The price you're aiming for: two to four dollars a plant. Not six or seven. Once you're into 140mm pots you're at $15–19 a plant, and for the numbers a garden needs, that maths stops working for modest budget gardens.
Where to buy, in order
| Order | Supplier | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Native seed | If your palette has native grasses, grow them yourself. A kilo bag runs a couple of hundred dollars and yields thousands of plants. Nothing else comes close on cost. |
| 2 | Jayfields Nursery | Wagga. Hiko trays of 40. Minimum order 120 plants. Best quality stock available. |
| 3 | Greening Australia | Aranda. Tubestock, $3.50 a plant. Plant sales only — they don't retail to the public week to week, so watch for their sale days and plan around them. |
| 4 | Provincial Plants & Landscapes | Pialligo. Hikos, good for wildflowers and grasses. Plant list on their website. |
| 5 | ACT & Southern Tablelands Native Nursery | Tubestock. Stock list changes constantly — check what they have. |
| 6 | Cool Country Natives | Excellent stock but retail pricing. Use for accent plants you can't get elsewhere. |
| 7 | Canberra native plant society list | A PDF of suppliers. Dated 2021 but still largely current. Plus markets and plant sale days. |
How many plants
Work out your area, pick a density, multiply. Nine plants per square metre is what I plant to as standard — the garden establishes fast and the plants themselves suppress weeds. It also costs the most.
| Density | Effect | 100m² at $3.50 |
|---|---|---|
| 9 / m² | My standard. Fast establishment, weeds suppressed by the planting itself. | ~$3,150 |
| 5 / m² | Workable. Slower to close over. | ~$1,750 |
| 4 / m² | The floor. Below this, weeds win the gaps. | ~$1,400 |
If the number is still too big, consider doing a smaller area well first. Halve the area rather than thinning the planting. A dense 50m² will look and behave better than a sparse 100m², and the plants you put in can be divided and spread into the rest later.
Measure your beds with a tape, not a laser, and round up — you are buying plants, not pouring concrete. Round up and you have spares; rounding down leaves gaps for the weeds.
Ordering
Send your plant list to the suppliers. They'll come back with what they can and can't supply, and they'll often suggest substitutes that work just as well.
Wait for more species rather than filling the palette with fewer. Diversity is the whole point. If you can only get half the list right now, take half the list — don't fill the gaps by doubling up on what's available. The garden you're building is a community, and it wants as many different members as it can get.
When they arrive: small pots dry out fast. Keep them somewhere shaded and watered and they'll hold for six or twelve months if they have to — not ideal, but survivable. The risk isn't the ground, it's the wait before the ground.
This series comes from the Garden Guide I give my design clients. I write one letter a week on spatial design, craft and technology — and subscribers read the full guides first.
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