Gardening Australia episode 18 2022: Jane and Millie tour the biggest garden show in the Southern Hemisphere; Costa meets with bonsai curators; Jerry learns about Camellia cultivation; Clarence visits a biodiverse property; Tino grows the perfect cup of tea.
Inspiring, entertaining and full of practical advice, join Costa Georgiadis and the team as they unearth gardening ideas, meet avid gardeners and look at some of the most inspiring gardens from across the country.
Gardening Australia episode 18 2022
Plants on Parade
Jane and Millie head to the horticultural spectacular that is the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show speaking to some of the daring designers behind the top display gardens as well as exploring some of the many wonderful plants for sale.
The Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show at the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton is the largest event of its kind in the southern hemisphere. It hosts a huge range of specialist plant growers, floral displays, garden designs and products.
One of the biggest drawcards are the inspirational show gardens by some of Australia’s premier landscape designers. Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott AO, has been involved in the creation of one of the highlights. ‘Tramlines’ is a “fully accessible and disability inclusive garden” achieved through paths suitable for wheelchairs, comfortable seating, and sensory plantings that Dylan is most proud of. “They’re Australian natives but they also have different feels, different sounds, different smells for people with different sensory disabilities.”
For Landscape Architects Anthony Sharples and Alistair Kirkpatrick, their garden was not just about garden inspiration, the sunken house covered in plants was designed to get people talking about climate change and our role in it. Anthony says, “it’s not a doom and gloom piece, we are kind of highlighting the fact that the environment will continue, the environment will heal itself. When plantscapes rewild themselves they do look quite beautiful. I think anyone who has a garden, anyone who has land it’s so important to introduce habitat and ecology through different design moves” to give back to nature and make a positive contribution to reducing the impact of our changing climate.
Arboretum Art – Gardening Australia episode 18 2022
Costa visits the National Arboretum in Canberra, to tour some of the stunning trees in the bonsai collection and learns about their special care requirements. The ACT is home to the National Arboretum, created in the aftermath of the 2003 bushfires and officially opened in 2013. It’s an undeniably beautiful site with 44,000 trees from around the world including many rare and endangered species. The site includes a collection of trees on a small scale too – the National Bonsai and Penjing Collection of Australia.
Curator of the collection Leigh Taafe says, “Bonsai literally translated means ‘tree in a pot’. It’s the Japanese form of the art. What a lot of people don’t know is that bonsai actually began in China and predates bonsai in Japan by about 700 years.” The term used in China is penjing, which translates to ‘tray scenery’. Whilst bonsai is focused on single trees grown as miniatures, penjing can incorporate many elements of a landscape, including rocks to depict mountains, figurines, and several plants. Each one tells a different story.
Climate for Camellia
Jerry joins a clever collector of Camellias, confirming that these colourful plants can thrive in tropical conditions. We’re at Palmwoods on the sunshine coast, north of Brisbane. Set in a mosaic of avocado, custard apples and pawpaw orchards and banana plantations, you’ll find a totally comprehensive collection of plants not typically associated with the subtropics; camellias!
Along with his wife Steph, Darryl Baptie has dedicated the last 23 years of his life to collecting, cultivating and propagating these flowering stalwarts as the owners of Camellia Glen Nursery. “We thought this would be an easy thing to do, a semi-retirement”. This retirement project has swelled to the point where they’re now the custodian of over 350 different camellia varieties, thousands of plants and a full-scale production nursery. Darryl’s been the president of the Australian Camellia Society and a director of the International Camellia Society, and his business focuses on collecting and propagating unusual, rarely seen and older varieties of camellias.
Pruning Pomegranate – Gardening Australia episode 18 2022
Josh gives some tips on how to prune pomegranate to encourage a bumper crop. Gardening in winter is a great way to keep warm, and work put in now will set you up for a great spring and summer. That is certainly the case with pruning deciduous fruit trees, like this pomegranate, which needs some love. Pomegranates will grow to about 5 metres high and 3 metres wide, but a prune in late autumn or winter will maintain them to a more manageable size for harvesting the fruit and keep them in a tidy shape.