Siren song of backyard wilderness in Manly Vale

Malcolm Fisher's glorious garden in Manly Vale. Photo: Robin Powell

People make gardens for all kinds of reasons.

For Malcolm Fisher, a garden is an opportunity to connect with the natural landscape. And not just any natural landscape, but the pre-development landscape of his home. His garden is on its way back to what Captain Arthur Phillip trekked through when he explored the area around what is now Manly Creek in 1788.

For Fisher, a resident of Manly Vale for 20 years, exotic species and clever new native hybrids bred for bigger flowers and easier gardening are anathema at best, weeds at worst.

Yet, Fisher allows the introduced species camping in his garden to be overtaken by the bush, rather than ripped out. His is a patient approach to wilding the backyard. His only intervention is to plant seedlings of local species and to occasionally battle the onion grass. So gazanias still bloom over the front wall, and the lemon tree that was once the only living thing in the long narrow backyard is still there, though now dwarfed by banksia and hemmed in by humming pines.

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Fisher's path back to the bush started with a campaign to stop the sell-off and development of part of the catchment above Manly Dam. The campaign failed but the Save Manly Dam Catchment Committee stayed together and took on the project of saving Mermaid Pool. The rock pool at a bend in the road leading to Manly Dam Reserve was named in the 1930s for the naked girls who used to swim in it. The idyll was smashed when suburbia arrived and the pool became a dumping ground for building rubble, general rubbish and garden waste.

It was here Fisher honed his bush regeneration skills, his awareness of the incredible diversity of Sydney sandstone and Cumberland plain flora, and his rage against introduced weeds.

The beautiful pool and its rock face surrounds were choked with garden plants gone feral. Lantana, the tradescantia that is variously called wandering Jew or creeping Christian, morning glory, ivy, monstera, agapanthus and others had monstered the bush, and the pool was full of water weeds and rubbish. Now the pool is coming back to life (though the mermaids are yet to make an appearance).

In his own garden, too, Fisher faces a long wait before the incredible diversity of the local bush re-establishes. But there are plenty of treats in the meantime: the scarlet lips of kennedia, spikes of fragrant rock orchids, giant clumps of swamp lily, weird local hakeas, hanging hands of hop bush and lots of wildlife. He welcomes signs of bandicoot action, the arrival of ring-tailed and brush-tailed possums, blue-tongued lizards, water dragons and geckoes. There are frogs in the pond and native bees busy in the lomandra. This is less a garden than an un-garden, and the very long time locals are loving it.

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Siren song of backyard wilderness in Manly Vale