Climate scientist Maquel Brandimarti has lived in a cottage on Belmont Street for the past 10 years. An avid gardener, Maquel recently completed a PhD on kangaroo ecologies at the University of Sydney.

In her back garden there are chickens in a coop and a resident ringtail possum. The garden is shaded by a big silky oak and a lemon-scented gum tree. The front garden is given over to growing vegetables.

Maquel learnt to garden from her father and her grandfather. She recalls her nonno’s (grandfather’s) abundant vegetable patch with rows of tomatoes, as well as his penchant for concrete and the statues he would make of his grandchildren. Maquel finds a real shared joy in gardening.

‘You get pleasure from giving plants away because you’re proud of them; you want someone else to grow what you have been growing,’ she says.

Maquel gets inspiration for her own garden from the local Green Square area. She looks to her neighbour’s gardens and community gardens such as the nearby Sydney City Farm, located at Sydney Park. By paying attention to other gardens, she

can see what might grow well in her own. She aspires to start a roof garden or to make a home for bees. Maquel’s front garden gets a lot of attention from passers-by. When she’s gardening, many people pass on words of encouragement—‘that’s such a good idea’ or ‘good on ya’—or stop to chat. Even when Maquel is inside the house, she can hear people admiring her garden or showing their children different vegetables. In that sense, she says, the garden is an educational tool that helps build local relationships.

‘If I didn’t have that garden, I wouldn’t know half the neighbours—it’s such as talking point,’ she says.

‘Since I have put mine up, a couple of others have done theirs as well. There’s lots of community engagement.’ Aside from the plants and chickens, there is plenty of other life in Maquel’s garden: mynas, lorikeets, flying foxes and the ringtail possum. Maquel is mindful that it’s a shared space with other species—when she wanted to remove a vine from the garden that she knew the possum loved, she did it slowly, piece by piece, over the course of the month. At the same time, she and her partner built a possum box out of found plywood and installed it in the garden. Recently, her partner climbed up and saw that that the possums had made it their home.

‘The chickens had galangal in their pen, but they destroyed it. There was one frond left which I rescued. It made an amazing recovery—it’s very resilient.’