A deep exploration of Australia’s ancient horticultural traditions in Gardening Australia 2025 Episode 20 reveals that gardening is far more than cultivation; it is an act of profound connection. The program journeys across the continent, highlighting how First Nations communities continue to nurture the land. They listen to its rhythms and share knowledge that has sustained people for millennia. This unique perspective offers invaluable lessons for a more sustainable and connected future.
The relevance of this ancient wisdom has never been greater. Modern gardeners and land managers increasingly seek sustainable practices that work with nature, not against it. Consequently, they are turning to the deep well of Indigenous knowledge. This knowledge system, refined over tens of thousands of years, provides a blueprint for resilience. It shows how to read the land’s subtle cues and live in harmony with its cycles.
The scope of Gardening Australia 2025 Episode 20 is vast, stretching from the lush floodplains of Kakadu to the unique ecosystems of south-west Western Australia. Each story serves as a chapter in a larger narrative. This narrative celebrates the passing of skills from one generation to the next. It demonstrates how traditional practices are being adapted in innovative and contemporary ways. The episode showcases a living culture, not a historical relic.
At the heart of these stories is the concept of bush tucker. This term, however, barely scratches the surface of a complex and sophisticated system. It represents an intimate understanding of botany, ecology, and seasonal availability. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, plants are not just food. They are also medicine, tools, and spiritual markers woven into the fabric of culture and Country. This holistic view provides a powerful alternative to conventional agriculture.
This exploration reveals how knowledge is intrinsically linked to place. The plants, their uses, and the stories attached to them are specific to each region and community. This deep connection fosters a profound sense of responsibility and custodianship. It is a relationship built on reciprocity, where caring for Country ensures that Country, in turn, cares for its people. The episode powerfully illustrates this dynamic through personal stories of resilience and innovation.
The theme of intergenerational knowledge transfer is a powerful current running through the episode. It highlights the vital role of elders in teaching the next generation. Simultaneously, it celebrates the passion and vision of young leaders who are carrying these traditions forward. This exchange ensures that ancient wisdom remains vibrant and relevant. It becomes a tool for cultural revitalisation, community empowerment, and environmental stewardship.
The Ancient Pantry: Kakadu Cooking and the Bunya Pine
In the heart of Kakadu, a powerful story of culinary heritage unfolds at Patonga Homestead. Here, traditional owner Jessie and her son Ben have cultivated an impressive kitchen garden that blends native and non-Indigenous plants. Their work exemplifies the seamless integration of ancient food knowledge with modern culinary arts. Ben, a passionate cook, transforms ingredients foraged from the bush into contemporary dishes, a skill he learned from his mother. This passing of knowledge is central to their mission of connecting people back to Country through food.
A key ingredient in their cooking is the cheeky yam. This bush yam contains toxins that must be leached out before it is safe to eat. Ben follows the traditional method taught by his mother, placing the yam in a running creek overnight. This process removes the “cheekiness,” rendering it edible. He then combines the neutral-flavoured yam with the sweetness of starfruit from their garden. For acidity, he uses the bodies of green ants, a traditional source of tangy flavour. The result is a visually stunning and complex salad that tells a story of the land.
Further south, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, another ancient food source receives its due celebration. The Bunya Dreaming festival, organised by Kabi Kabi elder Aunty Beverly Hand, honours the immense cultural significance of the Bunya Pine. This remarkable tree is a living fossil, a species that has existed for 200 million years and was once food for dinosaurs. For Aboriginal people, the bunya is a sacred tree, and a traditional law forbids harming it in any way.
The festival revitalises cultural traditions in a contemporary setting. It features challenges based on traditional practices, such as bunya nut gathering, shucking, and storing. Aunty Bev explains the heartbreaking history of early settlers who, seeing only timber, felled the magnificent trees. The festival is an act of healing and reclamation. It brings the community together to share, care, and celebrate the enduring legacy of the Bunya Pine, a giant that connects people to a history stretching back to Gondwana.
Cultivating Community and Connection to Country
On Wiradjuri country in Dubbo, a native nursery is proving that the most important thing you can grow is people. Robert Riley, a proud Wiradjuri man, established Indigenous Concepts and Networking (ICaN) as a 100% Aboriginal-owned enterprise. The nursery provides a supportive, outdoor learning environment for Aboriginal people. It focuses on creating opportunities for the long-term unemployed and local youth, helping them build skills, routine, and self-worth.
The nursery specialises in local native plants that are hardy and culturally significant. For example, the Callistemon brachyandrus, or prickly bottlebrush, was traditionally valued because it attracts small birds. Today, its spiky nature provides a modern use as a deterrent for unwanted cats and dogs in gardens. Similarly, the Dianella longifolia, a native grass, provided fibres for basket weaving and edible berries. Its hardiness now makes it a popular choice for low-maintenance public landscaping.
The program extends beyond horticulture into broader education. School groups visit the nursery for hands-on lessons that integrate mathematics, geography, and biology with cultural learning. Students learn the Wiradjuri names for plants and discover their traditional uses. Robert Riley notes that the growth he sees in people is far more rewarding than the growth of the plants. The nursery has become a powerful vehicle for reconnecting people to Country and restoring a sense of identity and purpose.
This theme of using gardens for cultural revitalisation is echoed in Alice Springs. At the Alice Springs Language Centre, a memorial garden has become a key tool for teaching the Arrernte language. The garden was the dream of a beloved former teacher. It now serves as a living classroom for students who may not have the opportunity to go out bush. It provides a tangible, sensory connection to the language they are learning.
The garden is filled with bush bananas, tomatoes, onions, and various medicinal plants. Elders visit to share their knowledge, showing students how to identify plants and understand their uses. They learn to find yalke, or bush onions, by recognising the grass that grows above them. They are shown how to grind seeds to make damper and prepare arrethe, a bush medicine. This hands-on experience ensures that the Arrernte language and the knowledge it carries are passed down to the next generation.
Reading the Land: Noongar Seasons and Country-Centred Design in Gardening Australia 2025 Episode 20
In the Beeliar Regional Park near Perth, Noongar woman Marissa Verma shares a different way of understanding the environment. She explains the Noongar six seasons, a system based not on fixed calendar dates but on the observable changes in the landscape. This nuanced approach to time is guided by what plants are flowering, what animals are active, and what foods are available. It is a deep reading of the land that allowed Noongar people to live sustainably for millennia.
The six seasons—Birak, Bunuru, Djerin, Makuru, Djilba, and Kambarang—dictated a seasonal migration. People moved from the coast to the hills and back again, following the abundance of nature. During Djerin, for example, the flowering of the swamp banksia was an indicator that it was time to be near the wetlands. The nectar from its flowers was swirled in water to create a sweet, healthy drink. Marissa also points to the peppermint tree, or wanil, whose crushed leaves release powerful oils used to treat colds and clear sinuses.
This system offers a profound lesson for all gardeners. It encourages a shift from a rigid, date-based schedule to one based on careful observation. By paying attention to these environmental clues, gardeners can better understand when to plant, prune, and harvest. The Noongar six seasons model is a masterclass in attunement. It reminds us that the garden is a dynamic ecosystem with its own rhythm and language.
This philosophy of working in harmony with the land is embodied in the concept of country-centred design. Presenter Clarence Slockee, a proud Bundjalung man, has followed a path that led him from landscaping and performance to creating Australia’s first native rooftop farm. His work culminates in an exhibition at the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. His team’s approach is rooted in the idea of leaving a lighter footprint on the earth.
Country-centred design asks how we can live more sustainably by considering the entire lifecycle of the materials we use. It prioritises local resources and ensures that what is taken from the land can eventually be returned to it. This approach is more than an architectural style; it is a deep-seated ethic of care and belonging. It represents the application of ancient Indigenous knowledge to solve modern challenges, creating spaces that are not just built on the land, but are truly of the land.
Cultivating Tomorrow: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Gardens
Standing in your own backyard after absorbing these stories, you might find yourself seeing everything differently. That weedy corner you’ve been meaning to “fix” could hold native plants your local Indigenous community has treasured for generations. The rigid planting schedule pinned to your garden shed wall suddenly seems less important than watching for the subtle signals your landscape is already sending—the first flowering that whispers it’s time to plant, the birds that announce seasonal shifts your calendar never mentions.
What makes Gardening Australia’s exploration so transformative isn’t just the practical techniques it reveals, though those are invaluable. It’s the profound reframing of what gardening means. When Ben transforms toxic cheeky yams into contemporary cuisine, or when Robert Riley watches unemployed youth discover purpose through native plant propagation, they’re demonstrating that gardens are never just about plants. They’re about relationships—to place, to people, to knowledge systems that have sustained life for tens of thousands of years.
The Noongar six seasons offer perhaps the most immediately applicable wisdom for any gardener. Instead of forcing your garden to conform to arbitrary dates, you learn to read your landscape like a complex, ever-changing text. The banksia that signals wetland abundance, the peppermint tree whose leaves clear your sinuses—these become your gardening calendar, written in flowers and leaves rather than printed pages. This isn’t romantic primitivism; it’s sophisticated ecological literacy that modern permaculture and regenerative agriculture are only beginning to rediscover.
Most powerfully, these stories reveal gardening as an act of cultural stewardship. When elders at the Alice Springs Language Centre teach students to identify bush onions by the grass above them, they’re not just passing on plant knowledge—they’re keeping entire worldviews alive. Every native plant you choose, every traditional technique you learn, becomes a small act of cultural preservation and environmental healing.
The country-centred design philosophy that Clarence Slockee champions at the Venice Architecture Biennale points toward gardening’s future. It’s a future where we ask not just “What can I grow?” but “How can I belong more deeply to this place?” Where success is measured not just in harvest yields but in the health of the entire ecosystem we’re part of.
For gardeners ready to embrace this wisdom, the path forward is surprisingly accessible. Start by learning about the Indigenous communities whose country you garden on. Seek out native plant societies and cultural centers. Replace one exotic plant with a local native this season. Most importantly, slow down enough to notice what your landscape is already teaching you.
The ancient pantry that sustained Australia’s First Peoples for millennia isn’t locked in the past—it’s growing all around us, waiting for gardeners wise enough to listen, learn, and tend it forward into a more sustainable future.
FAQ Gardening Australia 2025 Episode 20
Q: What is Indigenous gardening and how does it differ from conventional gardening?
A: Indigenous gardening represents a holistic approach that views plants as medicine, tools, and spiritual markers rather than mere crops. Unlike conventional gardening that follows rigid schedules, Indigenous practices emphasize reading environmental cues and working with natural cycles. This knowledge system, refined over tens of thousands of years, prioritizes reciprocal relationships with the land and sustainable stewardship practices.
Q: What is bush tucker and why is it culturally significant?
A: Bush tucker encompasses a sophisticated system of native food knowledge that extends far beyond simple foraging. Additionally, it represents an intimate understanding of botany, ecology, and seasonal availability specific to each region. Furthermore, these plants serve multiple purposes as medicine, tools, and cultural markers woven into the fabric of Country, providing a powerful alternative to conventional agriculture approaches.
Q: How do the Noongar six seasons guide gardening practices?
A: The Noongar six seasons—Birak, Bunuru, Djerin, Makuru, Djilba, and Kambarang—create a calendar based on observable landscape changes rather than fixed dates. Moreover, this system guides planting and harvesting by monitoring what plants are flowering and what animals are active. Consequently, gardeners learn to read their environment like a complex text, improving timing for all garden activities.
Q: What are some traditional food preparation methods still used today?
A: Traditional preparation methods demonstrate sophisticated food safety knowledge, such as leaching toxins from cheeky yams by placing them in running creek water overnight. Additionally, practitioners combine native ingredients creatively, like mixing neutral-flavoured yams with starfruit sweetness and green ant acidity. These techniques transform potentially harmful plants into nutritious, flavorful dishes that tell stories of the land.
Q: How can modern gardeners incorporate Indigenous knowledge into their practices?
A: Modern gardeners can start by learning about local Indigenous communities and replacing exotic plants with culturally significant natives. Furthermore, observing natural seasonal indicators rather than following rigid calendar schedules improves garden timing. Additionally, understanding traditional plant uses—such as prickly bottlebrush for bird attraction or as natural deterrents—enhances both ecological function and cultural connection.
Q: What is country-centred design and how does it apply to gardening?
A: Country-centred design prioritizes local resources and ensures materials taken from the land can eventually return to it. Moreover, this approach considers the entire lifecycle of garden materials, from sourcing to disposal. Consequently, it creates spaces that are truly of the land rather than simply built upon it, representing ancient Indigenous knowledge applied to solve modern environmental challenges.
Q: How do Indigenous communities use gardens for cultural education?
A: Gardens serve as living classrooms where students learn plant names in Indigenous languages alongside their traditional uses. Additionally, hands-on experiences like identifying bush onions by recognizing specific grasses above them make language learning tangible and memorable. Furthermore, elders share knowledge about preparing traditional medicines and foods, ensuring cultural knowledge passes to the next generation effectively.
Q: What role do native plants play in preserving Indigenous culture?
A: Native plants serve as vehicles for maintaining language, stories, and traditional ecological knowledge that might otherwise be lost. Moreover, each plant carries specific cultural significance tied to particular regions and communities, fostering deep connections to Country. Additionally, growing and caring for these plants becomes an act of cultural stewardship, keeping ancient wisdom vibrant and relevant for modern communities.
Q: How can gardening build stronger community connections?
A: Indigenous gardening projects create supportive environments that help people develop skills, routine, and self-worth while reconnecting with cultural identity. Furthermore, nurseries and community gardens provide spaces for intergenerational knowledge transfer between elders and youth. Additionally, these initiatives demonstrate that the most important thing gardens can grow is people, fostering healing and cultural revitalization within communities.
Q: Where can I learn more about Indigenous gardening practices in my area?
A: Start by connecting with local Indigenous communities, native plant societies, and cultural centers to learn about your area’s traditional knowledge. Additionally, many botanical gardens and universities offer programs featuring Indigenous horticulture and bush tucker. Furthermore, attending cultural festivals and workshops provides opportunities to learn directly from elders and traditional knowledge holders about sustainable, place-based gardening practices.
