My name is Matt Mitchley and I'm a collector.
I collect art deco furniture.
I collect wonderful and weird species of fish
and Australian native animals.
And my biggest collection of all is plants.
By day, I am a landscape gardener.
I also have a wholesale nursery.
That keeps me busy for most of the time
but I do have some big plans for the future.
I always see myself surrounded by nature
and there is no better place to do this than in Cairns.
I call this place the greenhouse of Australia.
So, I've always had a fascination with dinosaurs
and with all things prehistoric.
My collection is full of ancient plants,
ancient-looking plants as well,
and plants have the theme of the Jurassic era.
Some of the ponytail palms, the yuccas and the dracaenas,
they all have that nice big leaf structure
that really does look like it's from that sort of time.
My favourite plants have to be the ones with the most biggest leaves
and the ones that look the most Jurassic,
which I would say are the dracaena.
This is a Dracaena cochinchinensis. It's from China.
Dracaenas are all over the world, in deserts and in the tropics.
One of the world's most indoor species,
because there's so easy maintenance and easy care.
But put them in the ground in the tropics and they go crazy.
The patterns on the trunk are made by the leaves.
Each leaf that leaves the trunk
puts an imprint onto the trunk of the tree.
I planted this plant as a young plant to half a metre high
and it's probably been 10 years,
so in the last 10 years, it's grown this much.
Could have another 100 years of growth.
Yeah, so, it's a very long-lived plant.
Some of them live to 1,000 years.
These guys are out at night-time.
So, they just want to go to bed, I think.
These are Australia's most protected fish.
These are the Queensland lungfish.
They had no reason to ever evolve
because they're very happy in their life
and very happy with the situation that they're in.
They're good examples of the animals that lived back in the time,
in the prehistoric time, 150 million years ago.
I've tried to bring a part of nature into our living space.
Kids are so disconnected from nature at the moment,
so our grand plan is for my daughter, Summer,
to have access to all the plants, all the animals,
to recognise them and to be close to them.
I have a colony of magnificent tree frogs.
These are from the Kimberleys in Western Australia.
In the wild, they live in caves,
and very hot and humid caves,
so I've tried to replicate that environment.
And I've got a python as well and a bearded dragon.
I've got blue-tongue lizards.
The blue-tongues have been there for 10 years.
They're very happy, very little maintenance being outside.
But as long as you give them shelter, they're completely fine.
This is the edible pandanus. It is, um...
It's a great aquatic species that I use
to remove as much of the nitrates out of the water as possible.
It makes the water very clean.
All the nutrients that live in the water are being sucked up by these.
It means better quality water and it means less fish waste.
These guys are the most prolific growers,
and I give them a trim back every four weeks.
After starting my landscape business,
I used to go down to the green waste tip
and I saw so many plants that I could reuse.
I went there one day and I saw a cycad
that was just chopped up in the ground.
So I thought, "If there's a way of me saving one of these plants,
"I'll be very happy to."
So for the next few years I ran ads in the local newspaper
offering free removal for unwanted plants.
After five years of this happening,
I started to run out of space in my own garden,
so I had to find another place for them to go.
I was able to get a five-year lease on a piece of land
not far from my house,
and I've been able to create a Jurassic-theme garden
on a much bigger scale.
It's just at an age now that I'm really happy with it.
This site where the plants are now, it was just sand.
So the first challenge was to bring in soil.
So, 500 cubic metres of soil came in.
The next challenge was to condition the soil,
so trucks and trucks and trucks of green waste mulch
was brought in to the site.
There was a bit of excavation work and then the plants came in.
Some of them were giant plants that we had to crane in
and heaps of them was brought in by machine.
This is a Pachypodium lamerei.
It's about 15 years old and it's from Madagascar.
The armoury on this on this plant is very impressive.
Obviously, it was designed to stop an animal from climbing up.
If they're in a place that has very little water
in the dry season in the tropics,
their leaves are very well needed
in the environment for them to photosynthesise.
Can you imagine being a monkey and trying to climb this tree?
It would be pretty impossible, I think.
Because I've always been trying to create the Jurassic look,
it was a nice feeling when a lady said to me
that her daughter had driven by
and she wanted to see the dinosaurs that were inside the park.
That was great.
That was a really good time
to actually hear that it was actually working.
These trees are Moringa hildebrandtii,
and they are from Madagascar,
and they're actually extinct in the wild.
The most impressive thing about these guys
is the fact that five years ago, they were only seedlings.
So in the last five years, they've grown this much.
They're bottle trees,
so they absorb as much water as they possibly can
for them to survive the dry season.
In Cairns, they get water all year round,
which means that they can continue to grow.
So this is the reason why we have them so big so soon.
Most people's gardens now are too small to have these in,
but if you have a lot of land,
then it would be amazing to have these plants in your garden.
Everything's gone crazy and everything's grown and bloomed
and it is now the prospect of us moving this property
is...is quite a daunting process that we have to take.
We have another year on this lease,
and for the last five years, I've searched very hard
to find a bigger location that has good soil
that's also in Cairns.
So, only up the road, only 7km away,
we've just acquired a new property.
It's a block of land that I would like to consolidate
all of my house, my garden,
my wholesale nursery
and bring it all into one place.
The dream is to construct a huge Jurassic theme park.