After a rather long shift at a stall in the Sydney Garden Show yesterday I got to have a very quick scoot around and check out some of the display gardens. I hardly need to say that I was totally biased and basically only the ones containing native plants caught my eye.
The main garden near the entrance had many beautiful native grasses and reeds with Dwarf Kangaroo Paws and shrubs forms of Hardenbergia violacea. There was also little clumps of Scleranthus biflorus and Acacia ‘Mini Cog’ with plenty of crushed decomposed gravel. YUM

It was so lovely to see one of my current favourite grasses Meeboldina ‘Fiddle Sticks, in pride of place too, planted in clumps against the silver wharf timber posts.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how well native plants in general were represented in the show gardens. The image above was of a small display featuring ONLY natives, hooray! This pot contains two Brachychiton rupestris with some Rhodanthe anthemoides, in the background you can see the tips of Hardenbergia ‘Meema’ popping up.

In another display close by it was pretty much 90% natives with Bracteatha, Scaveolas, Brachyscomes and Dianella, technically the little ground cover in the front ‘Dichondra Silver Falls’ is not a native as it hails from New Mexico. I think there were also some Dietes in this garden.

Here is another shot of the same garden, with Correa alba and some dwarf Anigozanthos, it is a shame to see so many of the Dwarf Kangaroo Paws in the show, they really are temperamental on the NSW east coast and give the larger varieties a bad name.

Above there are some dwarf Anigozanthos planted around one large feature tall variety, which looks pretty interesting and I like the idea (if only they would look like that in the garden). Behind the circular planting you can see some Acacia ‘Limelight’ and Lomandra cv,   and behind that again some luscious Waterhousia floribunda, some Banksia integrifolia poking out on the right and then some exotic annually things….

The planting above was a very busy cottage style mixed garden, Philotheca, Westringia, Doryanthes and Rhodanthe and then some Carnations and Dietes…..so, so, so close to being all native sigh….

The Tristaniopsis ‘Luscious’ was super popular, I guess because it is thick and green with a pale trunk almost like an Ash.
There were other gardens of course one that I didn’t take any photos of as it was all exotics but then regretted it as it had such a modern native theme to it and could have been created easily with native plants.
It was all VERY interesting.