Choosing the right plants for your garden

Choosing the right plants for your garden – pay a visit to the Avenue of Achievable Gardens at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show

For many people, choosing the right plants for new or old gardens is a confusing mystery or even truly stressful! Van Leeuwen Green takes that stress and confusion away by ensuring that all our landscapes and gardens are plant focused. We pride ourselves on being plant specialists who create or restore gardens that are beautiful, based on careful plant selection. Clients’ gardens are assessed in terms of a range of factors from location, garden size and type, through to budget, climate and soil condition.

Getting plant experts into my company requires employing the best graduates in horticulture. Every year I like visiting the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (MIFGS) to see what the latest trends are and especially to see what the best and brightest students are creating in their showcase gardens. MIFGS starts this week on Wednesday March 16 and runs to Sunday March 20. I strongly recommend visiting The Avenue of Achievable Gardens. This is a student design competition that gives students from TAFE and University courses the chance to highlight their design skills and horticultural knowledge in real world, achievable gardens set up for the MIFGS event.

Students from the Burnley Campus of Melbourne University, Holmesglen Institute, Melbourne Polytechnic, and the Swinburne University of Technology set up small, stylish and functional gardens for the Avenue of Achievable Gardens. Many of the students have just graduated and are keen to get into the industry. They’re given the brief to create stylish gardens that are do-able on basic budgets with a big emphasis on using diverse, high quality plants in these mini-landscapes. The students will be there to answer questions and explain their designs, describe the hard landscape materials used and especially go through which plants they selected and why!

I’ll be there during the week visiting these achievable gardens and talking to the students. I’m super-focused on the importance of quality education for the horticulture profession. I was lucky enough to study at Burnley. Out of loyalty to my great alma mater I always make a bee line for the gardens of the Burnley students but I love catching up with all the students and their landscape creations. I really hope one of them could be the next Van Leeuwen Green plant expert!