(LIGHT ROCK MUSIC)
MILLIE: If you are a plant and garden lover in this town,
then there is always one week in your diary and it is this,
the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show.
It's a five-day event and it's always held
at the foot of these wonderful Melbourne Exhibition Buildings
in Carlton Gardens.
And it hosts a huge range of specialist plant growers,
floral displays, garden designs and advice
and every product you could think to have in your garden.
In fact, it's the largest horticultural event
in the southern part of the planet!
Jane and I are here today for you, to be your eyes and ears.
And it's so big
that I think we should get started right here and now.
Alright. Instructions?
You go that way, I'll go that way and I'll meet you in the centre.
Can't wait. See you!
Some people do find it a bit tricky
to just casually wander around the Garden Show,
and by 'some people', I mean Jane.
It's nice to be here after two years.
I've been a massive fan since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.
(LAUGHS) Which is only yesterday.
And we love you and admire you.
Very good! Well, you enjoy the day, won't you?
One of the biggest drawcards at this show are the show gardens
where some of Australia's premier landscape designers
demonstrate the latest garden trends and plants
and offer inspiration to all who come to see them.
And as it turns out,
Jane has managed to find that one of Australia's most inspirational people
has also been involved in the design of one of the gardens.
Hey, congratulations.
Thank you. Do you like the garden? It's pretty...
I wasn't talking about the garden.
I was talking about you're Australian of the Year.
Well done, you! (LAUGHS) (LAUGHS) I thought you...
Yeah, so, I mean, I still can't believe it.
Even when you say it, I just... I know!
It's just amazing and, yeah, I can't believe it.
You really have become a gardener. I have!
I wasn't the biggest green thumb,
but then I got a garden last year, got more into it
and then I got this opportunity to build this garden,
which is called 'Tramlines',
so it's a fully accessible and disability-inclusive garden.
It just looks like a beautiful garden.
It does. Now, what do you mean by 'Tramlines'?
The outside of a tennis court is called the tramlines.
Of course!
So, it's a bit of a tennis pun, right,
but it's also got just different accessibility features throughout.
So, obviously pathing so it's a bit easier to roll around,
seating for people in wheelchairs like me,
but the things I'm most proud of are the things like the sensory plants.
Yeah.
So, they're Australian natives, but they also have different feel,
different sounds and different smells...
Yeah.
..for people with different sensory disabilities.
You might see that a lot of the flowers are yellow.
If you are losing your vision or going blind,
normally the last colour you see is yellow.
Ah! How cool's that?
So, we tried to think of absolutely everybody.
There's an accessible fire pit.
I love that, that the fire pit has got the different...
The grass and then the bricks and then the stones.
What's that all about?
So, again, if you are blind... Yeah.
..you might not know that you're about to walk into the fire pit,
but when your foot hits a different surface, well, then you can feel it.
How cool's that? Oh, that is good, isn't it?
I think one of the best parts as well is
we're actually auctioning off this garden...
Yeah.
..so 100% of the proceeds goes to the Dylan Alcott Foundation,
our foundation, to help young Australians with disability
achieve their dreams, so start-ups, scholarships,
you know, equipment to become Paralympians.
And so this could be in your backyard.
And the great news is that the auction went really well
and raised over $35,000 for Dylan's foundation.
Gold medals all around.
At every Garden Show, there are a few things that get people talking,
and this year, this garden is doing just that.
It's making some very strong statements
about our future climate and the role we can play in it,
from the sunken house
to the neon signs saying this could be coming soon.
It was a comment on global warming designed in 2019.
We were thinking about sea level rise.
With everything that's now happening in Australia,
it's become more relevant than ever
with all the flooding that's going on.
Tell me about the figure on there, the neon...
Definitely.
So, it's 2.6 billion metres squared
is worldwide deforestation over the five days of the Garden Show,
so to visualise that,
it's a football field every second.
It's not a doom-and-gloom piece.
We are kind of highlighting the fact that the environment will continue,
the environment will heal itself.
When landscapes re-wild themselves, they do look quite beautiful.
I think it's, like, moving away from monocultural planting
and embracing diversity and embracing messiness, you know?
Like, I think it's so beautiful
to have a garden that looks wild,
it's overgrown, buzzing with bees.
You know, you dig a hole
and the soil's just all jumping with life
and I think that that's critically important.
I think introducing things like ponds and rocks for habitat,
that's how we can kind of give back with our personal properties
to this climate cause.
One of the show gardens I really loved
was Robert Boyle's gold-medal winning 'More than Meets the Eye'
with its avenue of silver birches underplanted with hydrangeas.
Not content with this beautiful display,
the garden also had five other areas
to sit and contemplate life.
It even had a veggie patch.
One of the best bits of this show every single year
is looking at some of the student designs.
They're a much more sort of modest space and budget,
but they have fantastic ideas and I reckon they pull them off...
Well, I'm not going to say better than some of the big show gardens,
but they certainly have a crack.
Tell me about your garden.
So, it's a contemporary edge on the native Australian garden,
so I'm trying to go away from the bush look
and refine the use of Australian natives
by giving it a Japanese twist.
Fantastic. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much. Cheers.
Great effort. See you, mate. Thank you.
G'day, Sarah! Hi.
First prize! Yes.
Tell me about yours.
I wanted to jam as many plants in as I possibly could, and so I have.
I've raised a boardwalk up so I could plant all underneath it
and just really maximise the green in a really small spot.
It's got a bit of an inspiration, this one too, yeah?
Bit of a throwback to being up in the Alps in springtime,
all the snow melting
and just seeing the forms
come back out of the landscape.
Well, I love it.
JANE: One of the highlights of every Flower Show
is discovering who was awarded the title 'Best in Show',
and this year, the title went to the garden 'Inner Life'
designed by Chris Jenkins.
Christian, is this your backyard? This is beautiful.
Oh, it's my backyard for the next five days.
(BOTH LAUGH)
And beautifully tropical,
but you're here in the heart of Melbourne.
Yeah, so, I love to play in the space of wellness gardens...
Mm.
..and I've always got a soft spot for a tropical garden.
Yeah.
And there's always the perception
that we can't have tropical gardens in Melbourne...
Yeah.
..but all of these plants are within a 50-kilometre radius
of the nurseries from Melbourne.
But the inner peace, that's really important in a garden, isn't it?
The body of water creates the tranquillity
and the surrounding of the plants creates the lush greenness.
You have gone over the top with the entrance way
with those elephants, though.
The elephants? Oh, I love going a little bit over the top.
(LAUGHS) Yeah.
Basically, I love depth, OK,
so the garden's 16 metres long and 12 metres wide,
and then by having it 16 metres long,
from the back of the garden, you look straight at the fountain,
and the beautiful Royal Exhibition Building,
and from the front, you've just got that nice depth
that takes you through the room.
And then the plants,
that's the key to garden design at a garden show.
You're only as good as your plants.
Good to see you in person, Jane.
It's nice to be here after two years.
And as I do battle with the crowds,
Millie's found a colourful haven.
(SERENE MUSIC)
MILLIE: How many different varieties do you bring to the show?
MAN: We've brought nearly 800 different cultivars of bulbs
and flowering perennials.
Yeah, we really want to educate people
so they have a better understanding on how to grow bulbs,
where to grow and what to grow for their climate.
And you are passionate about people understanding
what's inside this little nugget, yeah?
Definitely, yeah.
It's really important to understand what you're actually buying
when you buy a bulb,
the knowledge that the flower is actually already stored in there
from last year when it grew last time.
The bulb digests the foliage,
basically makes next year's flower as it's dying back down.
So, the flower's already in there?
The flower's already in here, yes. Show me.
We've got our nice fat bulb here
and we're going to make a gentle cut to have a look inside.
Now, I know people might think this is a bit sacrilegious
and we're damaging a bulb and, no, it won't come back,
it won't flower, but for the purpose of education,
Let's have a look.
On the inside, Millie, we've got...
Basically this big white part here is our energy source.
That's our food that's going to sustain our bulb.
In here, that's our foliage and flowers.
Now, if we wanted to be really careful,
we could actually get out each individual petal
and if you look very carefully, on the tip of my knife,
we've got the stamens already formed,
waiting for the right atmospheric conditions to flower.
So, that's the actual flower?
That's the actual flower
and there's a stamen sitting on the edge of my knife right there.
Oh, wow.
It's an urban myth, putting them in the fridge.
Putting them in the fridge will make them flower earlier
and potentially make the stems longer.
The key with bulbs is, just as they're coming into flower,
basically they're going to start looking for their tucker
to make next year's bulb,
so feeding as they're coming into flower heavily
and then they make a really fat bulb for next year.
The fatter the bulb, the bigger the flowers.
Those bulbs are just so colourful, Millie,
but if it's colour you want,
what's on display inside the Exhibition Building
is a riotous technicolour extravaganza.
There are plants as art, plants as window displays
and plants just being plants.
I love it!
Have a look at that! That is just unbelievable.
Beautiful orchids and lots of floral work.
They do a great job.
Hello!
WOMAN: We see you on television every Friday night.
I wink at you.
You don't know that I wink at you every Friday night?
There's no doubting how beautiful those plants are, Jane,
but, as you know, I do love an ambitious gardener
and a plant that gives back
and no-one does that better than Kerry West and her fruit salad trees.
I mean, I'm assuming your home garden is just full of these trees.
What's the record?
Well, when my husband started, it was out of poverty
and he put 30 different grafts onto a tree
and 29 were successful.
Wow.
There was, like, 15 different plums
and 10 different peaches and various numbers
and we all went, "Wow!"
But we don't do 30.
The maximum you can get from us is six.
But we can graft the same fruits of the same family
onto the one tree,
so you've got a citrus tree here with...
This is a lemon graft, this is the finger lime
and that's the Tahitian lime over there.
So, there's three different citrus. It could be lemon, orange, mandarin.
It could be grapefruit, tangelo. There's all different combinations.
How do you go about managing a tree with, like...
They have different characteristics, don't they, and habits?
Yep.
How do you control that in the garden?
Well, we call it balancing, Millie. Balancing.
So, if the growth of the lemon,
which we recommend you grow them all in their own little areas,
keep them that way - that's what we do -
and then we balance them,
so if the lemon starts to grow faster than the other two,
we cut it back and slow it down
so that everybody gets fed by the mother tree
that they're grafted onto.
They get fed equally and one's not allowed to dominate.
That's the key factor in fruit salad trees.
Fantastic. I reckon that's really good fun.
I'd be keen to know how many people...
Like, the maximum trees people have achieved at home too.
Could you help us find... I can help you, yeah. No worries.
Where is it? I think it's over that way.
(WOMEN LAUGH)
Good to see you. Thank you.
Can I borrow your wheelchair, please? And the man?
I'm not giving it up. You're not? Oh, blow. OK.
Hello.
After a hectic day at the show, I've managed to catch my breath
and sit down with a friend,
former TV presenter
and medal-winner at both the Melbourne and Chelsea Flower Shows,
Jason Hodges.
Fancy seeing you here!
Oh, fancy sharing a TV screen with you!
This is a very nice change.
Oh, well, it's good to see you back again, man!
Oh, look, the Garden Show, thank God it's back.
It was technically three years.
Two years ago, I was in the driveway with all my plants,
ready to drive down from Sydney to build a garden
and we got a phone call saying, "No, it's off."
Not on.
That was heartbreaking 'cause you've got sponsors
and materials and a team ready.
So, how is the show for you?
This is such an asset for our industry and for our community
and COVID's proven how important gardening is for all of us.
And all these happy people, all happy faces everywhere.
It's wonderful.
Yeah, the cheeks are starting to get sore.
So are the legs and it's only early days.
It is so good to see you, Jason.
Well, it's nice to be on a show that I've watched for so long.
(CHUCKLES)
How's your day been? Oh, my day's been fantastic.
What I like about it is that all of the people here have been happy.
Not one grumpy person to be seen
and they've all been wanting to know, you know, "What's that plant?"
"How would you do that in your own garden?"
And it's just a lovely place to be.
And it's so many different ideas that you can see,
but then you see people standing there looking at something
and then having their own ideas from it that they can take home.
And that's what gardening does, though.
It brings out the best in people -
happiness, joy, a reward -
and everyone should just keep doing it forever and ever and ever.