NATIVE TREASURES

Native plants are on trend. That’s the overwhelming message from the show gardens at this year’s Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. The show is an annual five-day event in Melbourne for gardeners from across Australia that wrapped up last Sunday.

It is held in the Exhibition buildings and tree-studded grounds of Carlton Gardens and attracts visitors from far and wide ,including Tassie, who enjoyed Melbourne’s (mostly) autumn sunshine.

The highlight for most visitors is the main walk, lined with show gardens. These large exhibition gardens showcase the latest trends, ideas and plants and are put together by leading landscape designers.

Native plants are a strong element in many of this year’s show gardens. While several concentrated on a palette of native species, other designers blended them with exotic plants. The show garden that scooped the award pool this year was created by a team of young Victorian designers from Eckersley Garden Architecture titled Australian Case Study Garden. It was commissioned by

Australian House & Garden magazine to celebrate its 70th birthday. The innovative design won gold, the best planting award and the coveted Best in Show.

Deep pools of green planting divide the space to create a modern take on the traditional Australian backyard (complete with a Hills Hoist). Interesting in the mix of plantings was the use of modern cultivars of native plants instead of more traditional plantings. Attracting a lot of interest was a lush green planting of a dwarf form of native frangipani ( hymenosporum flavum), which is normally seen in tree form.

According to one of the Eckersley design team, Clare Mackarness, the shrub form only grows to about a metre high so can be used as a hedge or border planting in place of exotic shrubs, such as gardenia. It has fragrant flowers in spring.

The garden also featured a mix of tall waving ornamental grasses, which erupted above the greenery. Both native and exotic grasses ( Poa labillardieri “Eskdale” and

Miscanthus sinensis “Adagio”) were used to create seasonal interest that could extend well into winter.

Further along was a garden planted entirely with native plants. The Grow Together garden shows how to create a garden that was both habitat and an outdoor space for entertaining. Designer Ben Hutchinson concentrated on small flowering native perennials to create a meadow effect around a level barbecue and seating area.

Native plants were also to the fore in the Living Garden, which took a silver award for Indigenous Design and STEM Landscape Architecture in conjunction with La Trobe University. The planting scheme recreated the extensive native grass and meadow environments of Melbourne’s Western Plains and showed how many types of native habitat could be included in a garden.

Both gardens dispelled the myth that a garden of native plants is all about shrubs and trees. A large selection of what can only be described as pretty plants filled the garden space. Tall native bluebells ( Wahlenbergia stricta), cut-leaf daisies ( Brachyscome

multifida) and common billy buttons ( Craspedia variabilis) provided a scattering of blue, mauve and yellow flowers among low-growing ferns, banksias and correas.

The use of native plants wasn’t restricted to the large show gardens. One of the Boutique gardens was also filled with a clever mix of native and exotic plants. The centrepiece of this small garden was a 3m-high Wollemi pine.

While these gardens are all temporary installations – built in a week or so and gone within a few days of the show closing – the long-term benefits of native flowering trees to attract birds was evident in Carlton Gardens itself. Rainbow lorikeets were holding a noisy garden party in the firewheel tree ( Stenocarpus sinuatus), which produces red, nectar-filled, wheel-shaped flowers in autumn.

To see more of any of the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show and Boutique gardens see melbflowershow.com.au or follow Jennifer Stackhouse on Facebook