Much of Dunedin's most precious resource is lurking in the backyard, writes Tom McKinlay.
We're city folk, we are, those of us who live in Dunedin. We pound the hard grey asphalt pavements, drive the sealed streets and buy our vegetables from other people.
Goodness knows where they are grown. Ours is a built environment. Right?
Well, week five of the Sustainable Living programme's eight-week course was all about biodiversity and the bounty in our backyards. And as it turns out, we have a lot more to work with than you might think.
Indeed, in a paper prepared for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE), a trio of University of Otago researchers set out what they had discovered in a novel survey of the Dunedin area.
''It was calculated that private gardens are the city's largest vegetation resource at 1184ha, followed by pasture then bush and forest. Gardens represent about 36% of the total city area including residential areas and the core central commercial and industrial sectors,'' they wrote.
So our environment really is in our own hands.
Indeed, here's how the report writers put it: ''The fact that private gardens comprise the greatest vegetation resource in the city emphasises the important potential role that they can play in enhancing urban wildlife.''
They are not referring to cats or hedgehogs or even students, rather the indigenous wildlife that clings on around the city, birds, lizards and invertebrates (insects). These too should have a place in our urban environments. Or to put it another way, we should be prepared to share.
Some of those backyard patches are a pretty good size: ''In Dunedin it was found that the mean garden patch size was 800sq m''.
Plenty of room for a lizard population or two, given the right sort of habitat and an even chance of avoiding the attention of Whiskers.
The Sustainable Living course sets out several ways in which backyards can be made more bird, lizard and weta-friendly. Among them is growing a wider variety of helpful plants and building some nooks and hollows that could become homes. More information is on the website www.sustainableliving.org.nz.
Of course backyards have other uses: timeless test matches and drying the washing.
But they also have a bigger part to play in food production. Again, there's more information at www.sustainableliving.org.nz.
But there's nothing guaranteed about Dunedin's happy riches in backyard gardens.
Indeed, the writers of the report to the PCE noted that ''there is an ongoing loss of garden vegetation through the process of infill development and the growing tendency to replace large single houses in sizeable established gardens with smaller multiple housing units that cover most of the previous garden area''.
''The cumulative effects of these developments ... is of growing concern to city planners and to those interested in the well-being of Dunedin's urban biota.''
Over to us then.
