What's different about Botany gardens
The soil is the thing to understand here. Botany is built on old wind-blown dune sand — roughly 100,000 years old, sitting over sandstone — so the ground is sandy and nutrient-poor by nature. That matters for a garden. Sandy soil drains fast and holds very little, so feeding and mulching aren't optional extras down here; they're what keeps a lawn green and a garden bed from giving up by February. We plan the feeding and mulch schedule around that, not as an afterthought.
The other thing worth knowing is what the land carried before the suburb did. Botany sits in the band where Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub once grew — a heath community that's now critically endangered, with less than about 3% of its original extent left, and pockets of significant native vegetation and wetlands still hang on near the bay foreshore. You don't need to garden like a bush regenerator, but it's a reminder that the natural plant palette here was always the tough, sandy-soil natives, and those are the plants that reward you for less work over a decade.