Gardening Australia episode 30 2022: Jane tours a patchwork of urban bushland; Clarence pots up soft and spiky native plants; Sophie meets a renter growing food with her community; Jerry tours an accessible garden; Millie builds planters out of pipes.
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 30 2022
Bush of the Bay
Jane traverses a patchwork of protected pockets of sandy heath bushland dotted through a bayside neighbourhood, maintained by prescribed burning and hand weeding. Jane is in Melbourne’s “bayside”; a belt of seaside inner-south-eastern suburbs known for lattes, designer dogs, waterfront mansions and competitive Sunday mornings spent in lycra. What’s less known is the trove of rare, local native plants persisting in dedicated remnant reserves in the midst of dense suburbia.
Jo Hurse is the Bushland and nursery operations manager, and for the last 20 years, has been responsible for the team that cares for these plant communities. “We have 7 what we call ‘bushland reserves’. They contain sandy heathland, and from Port Melbourne down to Frankston it would have been the predominant vegetation type.
“The textbook definition of ‘heathland’ is vegetation to only 1-1.5 metres high, dotted with occasional manna gums and wattles”.
The absence of trees, and the coastal soils of almost pure sand mean that surviving heathland plant communities contain a staggering diversity of local native species. Low, dense shrubs intermingle with a rich diversity of wildflowers, lilies, rushes, ground orchids and grasses.
Soft ‘n’ Spiky
Clarence talks us through the soft and spiky textures of the toughest native plants and their roles in garden design and ecology. Native plants come in so many shapes, sizes, and textures. Though they have a reputation for being tough, some of them are big softies. Clarence explains how leaf texture and structure tells us about each plant’s role in the environment. To showcase how they can be utilised to create stunning contrast in the landscape, he pots up a combination of textures for any garden.
Growing Community
Sophie meets a young gardener growing food out of her rental backyard with a network of neighbours who share produce, resources, and knowledge. For many gardeners, living in a rental home can really put a dampener on garden-dreams, but for young horticulturist, Brooklyn Mabbot, her rental backyard has been a gateway to living out her food production and community building ambitions.
Sophie Thomson visits a garden in Bowden, ten minutes away from the busy city streets of Adelaide. Here, Brooklyn’s urban edible garden is part of a network of neighbours who grow produce, share resources and learn from one another. Brooklyn ‘fell in love with the garden’ before moving in with friends five years ago and says the prompt to increase food production in the backyard just made sense. “It’s taken a few years, but the goal was basically to not buy any fruit or veg; we eat from here every day.”
When Brooklyn moved in there were eight raised veggie beds, “great infrastructure to start with, it just needed a little bit of love.” Initially the fruit trees were grown in pots and re-potted each year with Brooklyn hoping that “one day when I finally settled down, I could put them in the ground.” Luckily, Brooklyn’s landlord agreed to have the trees planted in the ground and they’ve thrived ever since.
The edible produce includes tomatoes, basil, carrots and beetroots, heirloom lettuce, spinach, broad-beans and broccoli. Brooklyn says, “I want to be able to put any excess out onto the street for anyone in the community to grab,” so they’ve set up a share cart at the front of the property.
Seasonal Sun – Gardening Australia episode 30 2022
Josh covers the impact of seasonal sun on the garden. Josh sits down to explain the impact of seasonal sun on the garden throughout the year, and how to plan to maximise its impact. Sunlight is the driver of any garden, particularly if you want it to be productive, so mapping out the seasonal movement of the sun in your garden is a great task to get you on the right track.
The further south you go in Australia, the greater the difference between the angle of the sun in winter and summer. For example, in Josh’s Garden in Perth, the sun in winter travels at a shallow arc, in a low angle in the sky. In summer, the sunlight in the garden is completely different, with the sun directly overhead and travelling at a much broader, wider angle.
To adapt his garden to this variation, Josh has planted deciduous trees and vines along the northern edge of the property to give shade for the house and outdoor living areas in summer. These plants lose their leaves in winter, so the low angled winter light can access the garden and inside the home.
Gracefully Gardening
Jerry tours a beautiful subtropical garden designed with accessibility in mind to ensure the owner can keep gardening for as long as possible. Jerry is in Fig Tree Pocket, a leafy riverside suburb in the west of Brisbane to meet lifelong gardener Sharon Pie, who has not only built a garden, but a family ‘compound’.
“It happened by accident. Serendipity. We have our family around and are connected to them on the property, but we don’t live in with them. People think it’s very strange.” The property consists of five titles and four homes. Living here are Sharon and husband architect Geoffrey Pie, and daughters Sidonie, Clelia, Kate and their subsequent families, all on their own, separate subdivided blocks.
“We moved here 27 years ago. Our youngest child started riding horses and we thought it was the right move, to support her riding horses to have more space. You could have 2 horses on this space. It was only done for the horses”. The one hectare property was subdivided into 4 four blocks, and over time Sharon’s children moved in one by one into the new blocks.
On their 2000sqm block, Sharon and her husband renovated an existing cottage, and built a garden that is deeply personal, idiosyncratic and detailed, crafted over a quarter century. On her block, smaller individual garden spaces are curated around particular focal points on the property, allowing her to focus her energy into manageable chunks. “The garden is maintenance free. I’m 80 and I need to be realistic about what I can do”. Most of the garden receives zero to little water, because “unless you’re watering food you really can’t be watering gardens”.
Potting Up | DIY PVC Pipe Pots – Gardening Australia episode 30 2022
Millie maximises the growing space in her home by building planters out of PVC pipes to fit perfectly in the narrow ledges of her windowsills. It’s no secret that Millie loves growing plants; in her world, anything that can hold soil can hold a plant. Here she is making custom planters to bring even more greenery inside.
Narrow spaces can be a challenge to grow plants, so Millie designed a drip-tray shelf specifically for pot plants to sit in. However, the only pots that fit in this narrow space are small terracotta pots, which hold only about one cup of soil and dry out quickly. So, she’s on a mission to find a solution to grow larger plants that won’t need as much attention.
