Monday, June 30, 2025

Plants

Plant PalettePlants

Celebration of an iconic tree

By Daniel Fuller

Eucalypts have dominated the Australian landscape for millions of years, and so it is with good reason that on the 23rd of March we celebrated National Eucalypt Day in Australia. To further celebrate this iconic tree, I interviewed four guests representing Eucalypt Australia on my podcast, with a separate episode covering a different topic each week throughout March.… Continue reading

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Plant PalettePlants

Understanding botany is useful in plant propagation

By Clive Larkman

Most of my articles have focused on different varieties of edible and household herbs, and occasionally on industry events or happenings. However, I haven’t touched on the actual botany of the plants I’ve written about, when in fact this is an area of great interest to me, particularly how plants evolved and why they grow where they do.Continue reading

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Plant PalettePlants

The many uses of Buxus

By Patrick Regnault

Buxus evokes images of clipped Renaissance garden hedges, the formality of inner-city courtyards, or perhaps even topiary. This humble plant has a long and distinguished history, as an ornamental plant and its utilisation in wood turning and carving, and traditionally, as a medicinal plant.Continue reading

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Turf

Turf as a living fire break

By Sandra Godwin

The bushland surrounding its coastal communities is one of the major attractions of the Noosa area on Queensland’s popular Sunshine Coast. However, after being evacuated with 7000 others as a wall of flames bore down on Peregian Beach in spring 2019, The Retreat operators Dan and Nora Gleeson vowed to take action to better protect the resort against future bushfires.Continue reading

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Botanic Gardens

Reflections on the current challenges of saving threatened flora

By Daniella Pasqualini

The Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan (ABGMA) is home to some impressive facilities including the recently relocated National Herbarium of NSW and the PlantBank, our state-of the art seed storage facility. Behind these special buildings lies a humbler but just as important set of structures, the nursery, where horticulture meets science.Continue reading

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Fruit Trees

(Mary Mary quite contrary…) How do your fruit trees grow?

By John Fitzsimmons

Depending on your age and experience, the ways you perceive how fruit is grown could be extremely different. Today’s commercial orchards are radically different spaces to nostalgic visions of broad canopies of vase-pruned trees, modest fruit yields and long-term expectations, yet there are many contemporary commercial trends that could be applied to advantage in modern landscapes involving edibles, even in small spaces.Continue reading

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Plant PalettePlants

Australian plant foods – edible and eatable?

By Clive Larkman

Bush Tucker, Aussie Edibles, Native Food, are just some of the group names given to Australian native food plants over the past few decades. Like other major climatic regions, we have a mass of edible plant genera, some as leafy greens, some as fresh fruit, some as tubers and rhizomes, and some as herbs and spices.Continue reading

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Turf

Designing the ideal urban green environment for healthy humans

Article supplied by Turfbreed

An international study of parks and gardens has found they play an important role in the health of both people and the environment, and it’s all related to what’s under the ground – a huge range of microbes that perform valuable functions such as filtering pollutants and maintaining soil fertility and plant health.Continue reading

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