MAN: We collect plants that you will not find in normal nurseries,
so we say we start where most nurseries finish,
so all the odd and unusual collectable plants
we do to the extreme.
So, here, you'll find cacti, succulents, orchids,
bromeliads, carnivorous plants,
but every plant that we work with, we work with to the extreme,
so, we have complete collections, not just the top five.
We might have 250 types of hoyas, 350 different types of tillandsias.
When I started, it was really just trying to create a hobby business.
We were dealing with collectors and mail order
to give myself and my brother a comfortable and nice income.
We didn't envisage having staff
or growing to the scale that we did,
but when we started, we found there was incredible popularity,
but we now wholesale plants right around the country -
Darwin, Cairns, Broome, you name it.
Collectors Corner really is
a culmination of 45 years of collecting.
My attention, basically,
is anything that lives, crawls or grows on this planet
or has ever lived, grown and crawled for the last 3-4 billion years,
so it's a way of me showing my experience, my hobbies,
my interests to the general public
rather than just holding them in a collection at home
that no-one can appreciate or ever see,
and that's what this place is all about, really.
These are two of my ammolites from my collection.
They're 60 million years old.
Their skin has created an opalescent-like mineral.
Pretty spectacular.
This is one of the best pieces in my collection.
It's a Permian reptile,
one of the first reptiles that walked on land -
some 260 million years old.
It's a rebuild of all the original bones
because they never come that when they fossilise.
Cacti were probably one of my first passions.
I started collecting when I was 11 years old
with a few plants in my dad's garden
and it has now culminated into what you see here,
this sunny display garden.
So, you can see in the background
almost 6-, 7m trichocereus cacti.
They can weight up to maybe 700 to 800kg.
There's also my giant elephant's feet in the back,
my Madagascan alluaudias
looking spectacular at this time of the year,
and there's little quirky, very unusual plants throughout the garden.
What I'm trying to do is make collecting plants fun,
to make people understand and appreciate
the beauty of these creatures,
and the only way is by displaying them in their natural settings
and it's the best way to actually grow them to perfection as well.
This is an experimental garden I created about a year ago
and the object is to grow different species of mosses.
We currently have about 15 growing at the moment
and most of them are actually doing exceptionally well,
far better than we expected.
But this is a work in progress
and probably taken me two to three years to complete.
(SERENE MUSIC)
This bonsai is one of the better plants in my collection.
It was donated to me in the 1980s by a woman called Evelyn Walscott.
She was getting too old to look after it.
She raised it from seed in 1948
and she was one of the early collectors of bonsai in Melbourne.
Many of my plants are actually given to us by people
that have become to old to care for them
and the beauty of bonsai,
it's something you can hand down for many, many generations,
so I'll probably hand this one down to someone else to look after
in another 20 or 30 years' time.
Probably one of my most successful plants
has been the monkey's tail cactus.
I imported the first seed of that
back in the late 2000s.
It comes from Brazil from a very, very small locality.
Once I raised the first seedlings,
I realised their potential and I started growing display plants,
which I exhibited at exhibitions and in Collectors Corner.
It'll cascade up to two metres down with very, very fine, fluffy spines
and will eventually make a stunning display plant.
We're in one of my three production facilities.
This is the most advanced.
It's 14,500 square metres of glasshouse.
Between the three sites,
I have 50,000 square metres of coverage
in which we produce quite a few million plants a year.
Trends are something I don't believe in.
Trends are something that we create,
so the fashion industry creates the next trends.
They know years ahead what they're going to do.
I know years ahead what I'm going to do
and so I'm actually ahead of the trends,
and, over the years,
many of the products that we've actually entered into the market
have become fashion trends in Australia
like hoyas and rhipsalis
and a lot of other plants that we've worked with.
One of the main interests I have in plants nowadays
is actually developing and breeding new hybrids
and this is an example of something that I did last year
just for the fun of it, not knowing what I was going to get.
I raised a few hundred seedlings
from crossing between this green plant and that plant there.
They're two unnamed species from Peru
and the expectant result were plants like this here
with brown leaves about half the size of both the parents,
but out of the blue,
we had seven seedlings
that came out absolutely tiny.
And, believe it or not,
that's a brother and sister of both the same age.
We will then breed this next year and probably even the year after
just to see how far we can change its colour, shape and pattern.
We do this with a wide range of different plants.
Plants are a living, growing entity.
They do something,
not hidden away in a book that you might look at once every 15 years.
No, plants reward you day by day.
To see a plant grow from seed through to flower,
it can be a three-month project or it could be a 50-year project.
My titan arum took me
10 years to flower
and its flower is 1.8 metres tall.
It's little things like that that make it rewarding
and every day there's something new and exciting and different
throughout my nurseries to discover.