Gardening on the other side of the world ...

A few months back, I stumbled upon the Australian equivalent of the BBC's Gardeners' World television show, i.e. ABC's Gardening Australia.

This programme has been running for over thirty years down under, and I think it's quite good.  There's typically more than 40 shows each year, all of them an hour long.

I've streamed several episodes that were broadcast over the past few years, and as well as seeing some wonderful new native and exotic plants (and pests) you can also pick up some really interesting hints and tips, and see how the approach to cultivation and pruning etc, often of the exact same plants, differs significantly from what's common practice at home. 

Water conservation and re-use for irrigation is also a very big theme throughout the shows.   And there are some other very interesting differences.   The presenters bang on all the time about how great it is to have a north-facing garden, which of course is not ideal here in Europe.

In the northern hemisphere, the sun appears to travel in a clockwise arc from east to west throughout the day.  But of course, south of the equator it appears to travel counter-clockwise, and in the northern sky.  And although I knew this already, having travelled in southern Africa and South America, it's not something I've ever really given much thought to in gardening terms - south equals sun is an ingrained concept here !

The programme features regular presenters from most of the Aussie states, from the tropics in the far north, the subtropics of coastal Queensland, Perth in the west, the arid heartlands of the country and the temperate regions around most of the southern coastline.

But it's the stuff from the cooler regions of Victoria and Tasmania that I find most fascinating.  They grow a lot of the same flowers and edibles that are garden favourites here in the UK, too.

I was watching one episode the other day when a lady was showing how she protects her citrus trees from frost in Victoria. 

She said she typically has several nights running of -5C temperatures in the winter months.  Hard frosts in mainland Australia - who knew ?

Well, the typical minimum winter temperature at our UK location is around the same - it's ten years since we saw the mercury dip below -6C.

And if it's -5C in Victoria then it's likely to be even colder further south on the island of Tasmania.   Where we live in the UK is in the mid-50s North in terms of latitude, but Hobart in Tasmania is only 43 degrees South, i.e. the same relative distance from the equator as the south of France for example, a region I make regular visits to throughout the year and which has a climate a world away from ours.  

So I've always expected even the extreme southernmost parts of Australia would always be much warmer than northern Europe - maybe it's the gulf stream and other air currents we have here in the northern hemisphere that keep the place warmer than it would be otherwise.

In addition to the typical northern European flowers, fruit & vegetables grown in southern Australia, there are some very interesting others that I would never have thought could be grown successfully in the UK.

But now I might give some of them a try ...