MAN: The colour is really amazing.
This is one of my ultimate favourite.
This is a variegated billietiae.
These tropical plants give us the sense
that if you take care of one plant
it will actually flourish and thrive
and it will show back to you.
It's actually just produced a beautiful leaf in here.
It looks marvellous. Look at that.
This will actually grow a metre long of elongated variegated leaf.
It's really, really nice.
You can talk to them if you want to
and they can actually respond to it if you just listen to them.
My name is Dexter Burgos.
I'm a horticulturist and a tropical plant collector.
My mum was a soil scientist and my father is an agronomist,
and they love collecting plants.
And that sort of brought my interest with plants in the Philippines.
When I was a kid I started with bamboo
and then grew up with...
And then palm trees, anthuriums, orchids
and then now aroids.
That enthusiasm with growing plants
pushed me to pursue the degree in horticulture.
Went to university and met Ruby, my wife.
She was taking up molecular plant pathology then,
and so we continued that sort of passion of collecting
while in the Philippines building family.
These plants are aroids that are...
Typically you can see them in the forest
growing on the, uh, terrestrial or climbing up the trees.
These plants are in a tropical area, so it's a warm condition, humid,
it's always wet and it's raining and there's a lot of light as well,
and there's no distinct season between rainy or sunny.
Most of the Filipino mums or dads,
they like taking care of these plants and bringing them inside.
Surround yourself with beautiful things
and yeah, you just...
You learn the beautiful side of life while you do it.
It felt like I know what I need to know
when it comes to horticulture in the Philippines,
and so I thought I need another place,
at the same time a good place to...to start a family.
So I applied as a landscape gardener in Perth.
So while I was away for five years,
Ruby was an associate scientist
for International Rice Research Institute.
She was doing a lot of laboratory work.
And at the same time she was mothering our daughter, Roxy,
who was four years old.
I've got a chance to go home every now and then,
and so our second child, our son, came along,
and eventually, after five years,
I was able to convince them to move to Australia with me.
We don't have an extended family here
and so these plants sort of gave us
a sense of belongingness or connection to our families
in the Philippines.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
It was a bit of a challenge
knowing that there's not a lot of tropical plants here in Australia.
I mean, there is some tropical plants,
but they're not the ones that we like to collect,
and so we had to import these plants from the Philippines.
At the start we are actually just collecting these plants
not for business, but then due to a lot of popular requests
by people that, you know, need to share your collection and all that,
we feel the need to share this with people anyway
because we've done the hard part of putting into quarantine,
leaving them for five months inside the quarantine facility.
And so having it here already
is an easy access for people that are wanting to collect that,
which...almost impossible for them to collect it before us.
Social media has helped us a lot
get noticed by people putting your nice plants in there,
and that actually brought the attention of a lot of collectors.
When you have a rare plant, the way to propagate,
the cultural practice is to cut them and wait for a new shoot to come out,
and it would take months or even maybe half a year
before you can get a proper plant out of it.
And so with the demand of people asking us
that, you know, "You have to share your collection,"
so we started looking at some things to efficiently share it with people.
And so we thought it shouldn't be that hard
for us to set up our own laboratory
and make some tissue culture for these people
that are wanting to get a hold of those plant collection.
We were looking for a product that would suit our need
to propagate quickly,
and we couldn't find anything in the market that would suit us,
and so we thought we'd just make our own...own product,
formulate our own formulation for the hormones
and use them.
It took us maybe six months to get the proper formulation
with trial and error, but then the results were actually really good.
Normally when you propagate, you probably get on shoot out of it
when you cut the top and then wait for the bottom plant
to give out a shoot you'll just get one shoot,
but with this hormone that we have formulated
you can get five shoots out of it or even six or even more.
(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)
The variegated billietiae is...
I would say there's... there's less than 100 in Australia,
but not on this size.
Maybe you'd get a small baby
for about, you know, five grand if you get lucky,
but for this size, it...you know,
you're probably looking at around 20 grand.
Another one of our favourites
is the Philodendron 'Florida Beauty'.
As you can see, the leaves are very different.
It looks almost like an animal or a dragon or something like that.
But this is also another variegated leaf,
so you get a bit of different variegation on every leaf.
This one's got more variegation,
and that one's more... got more green.
It's actually the variety of them that gets me into them
and loving the different shapes and the colour.
(ANIMATED PIANO MUSIC)
It's very much the same story as my parents.
My mum is a soil scientist, my dad's an agronomist.
They love collecting.
I've just come to realise about it earlier
that, wow, that's the same story as...as us.
It's, like, yeah, love collecting
and then eventually become a business.
I think I'm gonna keep collecting until...until I collect them all
even though I don't have the space to... (LAUGHS) ..to collect them.