Bird attracting plants: building a garden honeyeaters actually use

Planting one grevillea gets you birds for a few weeks a year. Planting a garden that honeyeaters, wrens and finches actually live in takes three things, and nectar is only the first of them.

The other two are cover and continuity. Cover decides which species can survive in the garden at all. Continuity decides whether anything is still there in February.

Know which birds you are planting for

Nectar feeders are the obvious ones: honeyeaters, wattlebirds, lorikeets, eastern spinebills. They are the reason people buy grevilleas. Insect feeders are the larger group by species, and thornbills, fairy-wrens, silvereyes and grey fantails take most of their food from foliage, bark and leaf litter rather than flowers. Seed feeders want grasses, casuarinas, wattles and banksia cones, and they are hard to hold on a small block.

Plant for all three and a garden carries a dozen species. Plant for the first alone and you get three.

1. Nectar in every season

The trap in a nectar garden is that everything flowers at once, usually spring, and then the garden goes silent for eight months. The fix is deliberate sequencing.

Grevilleas are the backbone because many flower for six months or more and several barely stop. Cultivars like Pink Profusion and Bonnie Prince Charlie carry a long season on garden-sized shrubs, and on acreage well clear of wires and buildings, Silky Oak becomes a nectar tree lorikeets work noisily each spring.

Bottlebrush covers the main spring flush with the heaviest nectar load of any common native, and weeping forms like Dawson River Weeper carry a lighter second showing later in the season. Melaleucas extend the same season, and the flowering gums deliver the biggest single event of the summer garden: a mature Corymbia ficifolia holds lorikeets and wattlebirds for weeks. It is a Western Australian tree; seedlings go backwards on the east coast, so buy a grafted form.

Then the shoulder seasons, which is where most gardens fail. Eremophilas flower on and off nearly year-round with a late-winter peak. Hardenbergia carries deep winter. Kangaroo paws run spring into summer, and Anigozanthos flavidus takes humidity and heavier soil better than the small hybrids. Banksias flower through autumn and winter when almost nothing else does, and they are what a garden already full of grevilleas is usually missing.

2. Cover, or you only get the big birds

This is the part almost everyone misses. Open gardens with nectar plants and lawn attract noisy miners and wattlebirds, which are aggressive and drive out everything smaller. If you want wrens, silvereyes, thornbills and finches, you have to give them dense, prickly, low-to-mid cover they can disappear into.

Dense westringia, low grevilleas like Poorinda Royal Mantle, and thickets of lomandra and tussock grasses do this work. Plant them in connected drifts rather than isolated specimens, so a small bird can move across the garden without crossing open ground. A shrub layer between knee and shoulder height, planted thickly, changes which species use your garden more than any nectar plant will.

Prickly beats merely dense. Grevillea juniperina Stripy carries short needle-like leaves that make it unpleasant to push a hand into, and small birds shelter and nest inside that thorny framework because bigger birds will not follow them in. Heath Banksia does the same job at a larger scale, with orange to red spikes open through winter. Wear gloves pruning either.

3. Structure, water and restraint

Layer the planting: groundcover, shrubs, small trees, canopy. Each layer suits different birds, and a garden with all four supports several times the species of one with only lawn and trees. Insect-eaters need the leaf litter and the mulch as much as the flowers, which means leaving some mess: seed heads standing over winter, leaf litter under shrubs, a few dead twigs in the canopy.

Water matters as much as food, particularly through summer. A shallow bath with a rough edge, placed near cover but not right against it, gets used daily.

Two restraints. Do not feed birds with seed or honey water; it spreads disease and creates dependence, and a well-planted garden feeds them properly. And keep the phosphorus away: grevilleas, banksias and other proteaceous plants are damaged by standard fertilisers, so use a low-phosphorus native feed or none at all. Our guide to growing banksias covers that in detail.

District by district

The commonest reason a native bed dies in its second summer is a Western Australian species planted into a summer rainfall garden. No watering schedule corrects it.

Sydney and the sandstone country

Acid sandy soil over sandstone, from the northern beaches through Hornsby to the Sutherland Shire, is the ground Heath Banksia came off. Plant it in numbers rather than as a single shrub, roughly 1.5m apart along a screen line, and let the plants grow into one another instead of clipping them.

Brisbane and the humid subtropics

Warm wet summers are the problem. Western Australian grevilleas and most eremophilas rot from the roots after a wet January, and they look healthy right up to the week they collapse. Stay with eastern species: bottlebrush, melaleuca, Banksia spinulosa. Anigozanthos flavidus is the paw that copes with the humidity.

Melbourne, Adelaide and the frost districts

Basalt clay through Melbourne's west, around Sunshine, Werribee and Melton, kills more natives than frost does. Mound the bed, or read our guide to planting into clay first. Grevillea juniperina Stripy comes from the New South Wales tablelands, takes hard frost, and grows in the cold tight clay that kills Western Australian grevilleas outright. Woolly Grevillea is a high country plant, reliable through Melbourne, Canberra and the tablelands, flowering in the cooler months. In Orange, Armidale, the Southern Highlands and the Adelaide Hills, Silver Banksia is the winter nectar plant, native to South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and the tablelands. It will not survive being watered along with an irrigated bed on clay.

Perth and the coastal sandplain

Pale calcareous sand over limestone behind the Perth coast means sharp drainage, salt-laden wind and a long dry summer. Grevillea olivacea Red is a standard informal hedge and windbreak plant there, at home on limestone and exposed blocks, and it holds dense cover right to the ground where small birds want it. Do not order it for a humid eastern garden on clay, where it is prone to sudden collapse from root rot.

Choosing between the grevilleas

Most red-flowered hybrids trace back to the same handful of parents and are near impossible to tell apart on a bench, so the cultivar name tells you little. Choose on habit. Poorinda Royal Mantle runs flat and roots down as it travels, which suits a batter too steep to mow; cut stray runners at the edge rather than shearing over the top, which leaves bare woody patches. Bonnie Prince Charlie is the low, wide-spreading one for the front of a bed. Pink Profusion is twiggy enough that a silvereye has somewhere safe to sit while it feeds.

One rule covers all of them: shorten the growth that has just flowered, a little and often, and never cut back into bare old wood, because grevilleas are reluctant to reshoot from it.

Sizes and spacing

Pot sizes describe the rootball, not the height of the plant: a 140mm pot holds about 1.5 litres of mix, a 200mm about 4.4 litres, a 300mm about 15 litres. Small grades usually win here: you need numbers, and a 140mm shrub planted in autumn often overtakes a larger one beside it.

Planting, and the first summer

Autumn is the window through most of the country; in frost prone tablelands, wait for spring. On clay, do not dig a deep hole and backfill it with good mix, which builds a sump that fills every time it rains. Raise the planting position, keep coarse mulch off the trunk collar, and water deeply once a week through the first summer.

What goes wrong

Noisy miners take over. Miners hold territory in open canopy over grass or bare mulch, so a block of lawn and two big gums is ideal miner habitat. The fix is a shrub layer thick enough that a miner cannot see through it, running ten or fifteen metres rather than sitting in one corner. Be realistic: one dense corner in a street of open lawns will not move a colony.

The cat. A garden planted for small birds and open to a roaming cat is a trap you built yourself. Contain your own cat and keep clear sightlines around the bath.

The natives share the lawn dripper. A grevillea or a banksia left on the same daily line as turf through a wet summer will rot, and Phytophthora moves quickly once it starts.

Then someone sprays. Bottlebrush pick up scale, and the sooty mould that follows turns foliage black; webbing caterpillar draws leaf tips into a shabby clump. Both are easier caught early, and heavy spraying is self defeating in a garden planted to feed insect-eating birds.

What to plant with them

Nectar shrubs alone leave two thirds of the local species out. The layer underneath is strappy and grassy: lomandra, dianella and tussock grasses hold insects, drop seed, and give wrens a low corridor between shrubs. Plant them in blocks at the base of the shrub layer, not as a thin border edge. Above that, leptospermum adds a spring flush on a twiggy framework small birds use, and wattles earn a place on any block big enough for one, less for the flowers than for the insects they carry, provided the species suits your district.

A fallen log or a pile of prunings in a back corner earns its keep: skinks live in it and fantails work over it daily.

A starting shortlist

If you are planting from scratch and want birds within a season: three long-flowering grevilleas, one bottlebrush, one banksia, a drift of kangaroo paw, and a block of lomandra for cover. That combination covers all twelve months for the nectar feeders and gives the insect feeders somewhere to work.

Browse the full range in Australian natives, or start with grevilleas and bottlebrush. Every order ships farm-direct with flat $99 delivery in QLD, NSW, VIC, SA, ACT and WA, a $399 minimum order, and the 30-Day Healthy Plant Guarantee.

Related ranges: Banksias, Tea tree and leptospermum.