Lawn and garden care in Redcliffe.

Redcliffe is the one suburb in our patch where the coast genuinely runs the show, and it changes almost every call we make. Salt spray lands on leaves and draws moisture straight out of the plant tissue, leaving scorched, brown edges on anything not built for it – and it's not just the plants exposed to direct spray that suffer, since salt also works its way into the soil itself over time. Wind adds to the problem, stripping foliage and drying out soil faster than roots can keep up, which is a real issue on a peninsula with very little to break the breeze coming off Moreton Bay.

The soil underneath makes the job harder again: like most coastal ground, it's sandy and free-draining, which sounds appealing until you realise it also holds almost no water or nutrition on its own. Standard inland planting advice doesn't transfer well here – a garden bed plan built for Narangba's clay-influenced sandstone country or North Lakes' modern estate soil needs adjustment before it'll survive a Redcliffe summer. Plants naturally built for this – coast banksia, pigface, lomandra – cope by excluding or storing salt in specific tissue, or by simply being built tough enough (thick, leathery leaves; deep, sand-anchored roots) to shrug off what a softer plant can't. Choosing the right ones from the start saves a lot of replanting later.