Sustainable Gardening in our Continually Surprising Climate
Join Kew-trained horticulturalist, conservationist, television and radio talkback gardening presenter Jerry Coleby-Williams on a small group tour of Singapore to discover its horticultural and culinary delights.
In the ancient landscapes of Queensland’s desert uplands grow many curious and attractive plants. Dame Quentin Bryce Ad, CVO, remembers the desert uplands for its ‘vivid red soils, its astonishing vegetation, its lakes, its slopes and its plains. For many of us it’s easy to miss these tough, resilient wildflowers when they’re in bloom –…
It’s avocado season in Australia and Vietnam. Anthracnose disease can significantly affect the yield and quality of avocado fruit. It’s worst in warm, wet, humid, calm weather. Irritatingly, the symptoms of disease become evident when it’s too late to protect your current crop, but once the fruit are harvested, you should begin a disease control…
If you live in south eastern Queensland and grow pawpaw, it’s worth a quick health check right now. Mild, calm, showery, humid winter weather is perfect for observing outbreaks of pawpaw black spot disease. But how best to manage this common problem?
We ignore the following key aspects of sustainable food production at our peril:
* A culture of forgetting – we forget our horticultural history;
* Declining crop diversity, both in the range of species grown and in the genetic diversity within each crop;
* The oversimplification and impoverishment of systems of food production;
* A reluctance to apply the precautionary principle where using the least toxic solution in crop protection comes first;
Grab your camera and join gardener and conservationist Jerry Coleby-Williams on an eleven day tour of choice gardens of the South Island of New Zealand while Middle Earth is looking its best this spring.
I’m waiting for the summer wet season to start. Until the rain arrives, there is little cloud to filter the hot sunlight. Thank goodness for old net curtains and shadecloth! I thought I would check my crops against those commonly grown in Vietnam. Despite the average weather, I have 114 different crops growing in my 300…
Ten years ago British Petroleum closed Prudhoe Bay, the largest oilfield in the USA. Rusted, leaking oil pipes heavily polluted a region already suffering from accelerating global warming. At the same time, melting permafrost had started to cause forests, roads and homes to start sinking into mud. Methane gas, once frozen under the ice, started…
Heathland is a general term for a gardenesque plant community found in parts of Australia where conditions are too tough for forest. In NSW, heathland is associated with sandstone, while Queensland’s Wallum heath (named after the Wallum Banksia, Banksia aemula) occurs on coastal sand. Kwongan is Western Australia’s version of heathland. Kwongan also occurs on various…
Question: “Hi Jerry, This year I have had the worst infestation of mealybug ever. My garden has never had them in the past, but this year everything including established Gordonia’s five metres high are white with them. I have lost quite a few hibiscus to them. Is this a bad year? Do you have one of your…
I invite you to join me in calling the Kaffir Lime a Kaffir Lime. Researchers and editors take note: it’s hip and more accurate to call the Kaffir lime by its original name!
Gardens take pride of place in tropical Singapore. It’s never been a more exciting time for an Australian gardener to visit. Singaporeans are obsessed with chlorophyll… They have long talked up the benefits of a city upgrade – from one of the world’s leading garden cities into a 21st century garden utopia. Now, they’re building it. Gardens by the…
Jerry Coleby-Williams 