Nature-strip gardens are a paradise for pollinators in your street

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In front of most Australian houses, between the sidewalk and the road, runs a strip of land most people never really think about. In Australia, it's called the nature strip, but it goes by other names in other regions, including a verge, parkway or tree lawn.

Usually, it's mowed grass with a lone tree in the middle. This setup doesn't provide many resources for urban animals that rely on complex vegetation for food, nesting and shelter. But add up every one of these strips of land across a suburb, then a whole city, and you have hundreds of hectares of public land doing almost nothing.

Here in Melbourne, nature strips make up more than one-third of public green space, representing a huge area of untapped potential for urban greening. It's time to put the nature back into nature strips. Councils across Greater Melbourne already allow gardening on nature strips (some with permits), and many nudge residents toward low-growing native plants to support biodiversity and soften the streetscape.

More plants and more variety should mean more animals, and more kinds of them. That's the theory, anyway. So we set out to test whether nature-strip gardens could actually support Melbourne's insect pollinators.

Not just introduced honeybees, but also the several thousand species of native bees, beetles and butterflies that do the quiet work of moving pollen around. Partnering with the City of Merri-bek and 14 residents, we ran a gardening experiment across Brunswick, Coburg and Fawkner. We used a before-after-control-impact design.

We recorded insect biodiversity before and after each garden was installed and compared two sets of nature strips: control nature strips left as they were and impact nature strips planted with a garden. If the gardens made a difference, the comparison would show it. We planted each garden with the adjacent homeowner's help, following the council's nature-strip guidelines and using native plants known to feed or shelter local insects.