The Mission Beach corridor sits within one of the most biodiverse landscapes on earth — the meeting point of the Wet Tropics World Heritage rainforest and the Coral Sea, home to cassowaries, spectacled flying foxes, sunbirds, honeyeaters, and an extraordinary diversity of wildlife that depends on the plants around it to survive. Gardening here with native plants is not just an aesthetic choice. It is a contribution to something larger.

The wet tropical natives collected here are plants that belong to this landscape — species native to the rainforests, creek edges and coastal margins of Far North Queensland that have evolved alongside the wildlife that visits, eats, shelters in and pollinates them. Plant them and you are not just filling a garden bed. You are restoring a fragment of the ecosystem that makes this part of the world so remarkable.

For cassowary country gardeners, natives take on particular significance. Cassowaries are rainforest engineers — seed dispersers whose movement through the landscape determines what grows where, and whose survival depends on a continuous supply of fruiting trees. Several of the plants in this collection are known cassowary food plants, making them a meaningful addition to any property in or near cassowary habitat.

Beyond the ecology, these are simply outstanding garden plants. Tough, adapted to the local climate, largely low maintenance once established, and capable of producing flowering and fruiting displays that attract the kind of wildlife activity that makes a garden feel alive in the truest sense of the word.

We grow and propagate these at El Arish on the Cassowary Coast, where they are entirely in their element.