Native plant porn at Kuranga Nursery

I finally made it to Kuranga native nursery last month in Mt Evelyn in Victoria and I wasn’t disappointed, all the hype turned out to be true, it really is the most beautiful native plant nursery. If only I lived closer…

The buildings are huge and house a restaurant, gift shop and excellent book selection, plus all the gardening paraphernalia you could ever need. Outside there is the the plants, so many plants!

The whole nursery is built around a central body or water like a small wet land or large pond, the water wanders all through the nursery and little bridges are built everywhere to connect different areas and encourage the feeling of wandering amongst a well manicured bush garden.

Pristine gravel pathways lead you around the central pond to all the well laid out semi circular plant displays. The plant displays are spotless also, not a weed in sight and everything is clearly labeled and tastefully laid out.

I love the way the pots were set out at different heights, tall waist high benches, knee high recycled sleeper shelves and on the ground. The other fantastic thing was the amount of sculpture, birdbaths, pots, ornaments, possum boxes and features they have incorporated into the stock.

There was the quirky, the tasteful and the bold, ranging in price accordingly 😉

Everything was considered and displayed appropriately, surely there isn’t a native plant in production in Australia that you can’t purchase at Kuranga 😉

The gardens themselves are beautiful, they are large enough to have swathes of native grasses and repeat plantings of smaller feature trees. I have never seen so many Leptospermum brachyandrum ‘Silver’ used to such great affect, they are planted all around the margin of the pond and were covered in flower. You can see them in my header image and in the image below.

My visit was sadly very short, I had less than an hour, potentially I could have happily spent the whole day in this nursery oohing and ahhhing at all the beautiful native plants.

I just wanted to share some photos of this inspiring nursery, the level of organisation and eye for detail is incredible, there is obviously a lot of people behind the place with a lot of passion.

For now I shall be comparing every nursery I visit to Kuranga native or not, and I can only hope that I will discover others out there who have set the bar equally high.

In the image above you can see Eucalyptus pulverulenta ‘Baby Blue’, with an underplanting of Chrysocephalum apiculatum and native grasses.

I couldn’t help taking photos of this very healthy Brachysema celsianum growing happily in the shade, it has been kept nicely pruned to stop it getting leggy.