By Isaac Olson, Nursery Near Me

Every nursery has an opinion about what Australians plant. We had a year of orders instead, so we counted them: 20,604 plants across 3,165 orders, shipped between September 2025 and August 2026 to gardens in every mainland state.

Half of everything we sent was native. In Victoria it was three in five, which surprised us; we expected Queensland, with its reputation for native gardens, to lead, and it came third behind New South Wales. The difference is in how natives are used. In the north a native is usually a lilly pilly hedge, one job and one species. In the south, natives are doing the whole garden: cut leaf daisies, yellow buttons and tussock grasses bought by the flat for groundcover, border and meadow. Victorians on our books are planting meadows where Queenslanders are planting walls.

The quality people asked for most, in every state without exception, was low maintenance. That is good news for native plants, because the ones suited to a district are the ones that need least from it: less water, less feeding, no spraying. Gardeners in Victoria, the ACT and South Australia also asked for bee and butterfly plants more than any other feature. The native garden is for habitat now.

If you are starting one, four natives earn a place almost anywhere: lomandra, the strappy tussock that holds a bank and asks for nothing; westringia, the coastal rosemary that clips into a grey hedge and feeds the small native bees; grevillea for the honeyeaters; and the local banksia, which feeds everything. Our Australian natives range at https://nurserynearme.com.au/collections/australian-natives is filtered by climate zone, and the plants for native bees at https://nurserynearme.com.au/collections/native-bee-plants are the ones the 1,700 species of Australian native bee actually visit.

One more number. April was our busiest planting month, ahead of spring, and it should be: a native planted in autumn has a whole cool season to put roots down before its first summer.

Isaac Olson is a director of Nursery Near Me, an Australian online nursery that delivers natives, hedging and advanced trees from grower to door.