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Plants growing on the coast or in windblown sites may adapt to the harsh conditions by becoming low growing. A low growing plant which is increasing its share of the market is Banksia spinulosa ‘Coastal Cushion’. This Australian native is a coastal form of...
Rich reds and bronzes are wonderful autumn colours. The autumn trees which most people think of for colour are liquidambars and claret ash. Peter Valder recently visited Merry Garth in Mt Wilson, NSW, which is full of autumn colour with bronzes, rich rusts and lime...
An interesting rare perfumed plant is Herald’s Trumpet (Beaumontia grandiflora) which has wonderful large white flowers with a sweet tropical perfume. It is a vigorous woody climber which is native to the region from India to Vietnam and belongs to the same...
What do you do when you’ve forgotten the mosquito repellant? Or maybe you’re suffering from sunburn and need a solution to calm your skin? Help is at hand, says Jackie French, if you grow Aloe vera. Aloe vera is a succulent which has many medicinal uses,...
Camellias are wonderful flowering shrubs for the garden, but they also have many other uses. They can be shaped into topiaries, standards or espaliers, and they can even be grown as ground covers. At the moment standardised camellias are very fashionable, but...
Until recently if you wanted a flowering gum tree you had to just go out and buy one and hope for the best. Sometimes the flowers turned out red and other times pink, but quite often it was an insipid white which you didn’t really want anyway. The good news is...
For dramatic autumn colour, tree dahlias are hard to beat. They are giant plants with huge leaves and stems, and shaggy, lavender flowers resembling ballerinas’ tutus. It’s not only the appearance of the tree dahlia which causes drama in the garden –...
Surprisingly, this beautiful Australian rainforest native is not as popular as it deserves to be. It is a member of the family Proteaceae, which includes grevilleas, banksias and waratahs. The tree is fairly slow growing and may not flower for seven or eight years,...
A sterile, uninteresting entrance to a home gives visitors a poor first impression. Don gave a boring entrance some style and class with strategically placed containers filled with grassy plants. First, some tall, squarish terracotta pots were spray-painted silver, to...
In keeping with the ‘weird’ theme of this week’s program, Don looked at some very curious and unusual plants. String of pearls (Senecio rowleyanus) This is a type of succulent that actually looks like beads on a string. It is native to South Western Africa. String of...