Monday, August 18, 2025

Plants

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

Read More
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

Read More
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

Read More
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

Read More
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

Read More
Aquatic greenlife

Aquatic greenlife reduces bovine greenhouse gases

By Karen Smith

What if you could take a waste by-product of your normal production process and turn it into an income stream, and at the same time reduce your carbon footprint? Collaboration between the University of Technology and Sydney brewers, Young Henry’s, are investigating the link between the diet of cattle and the greenhouse gas emissions they produce.Continue reading

Read More
Botanic Gardens

Go slow for a quick pick me up

By Daniel Bishop

Research is emerging confirming what most garden lovers have always known … being immersed in nature feels good! But this research is also telling us that it’s not just spending time outdoors working in the garden, walking through the bush, or running along beaches that gives the most benefit.Continue reading

Read More