How does your garden grow?

Botanists, gardens, and botanic gardens.

Pink-flowering form of Broad-leaved Paperbark (Melaleuca viridifolia), one of the ‘gloriously gnarly’ plants. © Bronwen Scott

If I had the chance, I would spend all my time walking around botanic gardens, talking to botanists, and writing about plants and the people who study them.

In late May, I had the privilege of interviewing five professional botanists about their own gardens. What do people who spend their career among plants grow at home?

Walking through London’s Kew Gardens on a winter’s day, the botanist Prof Tim Entwisle was struck by the sight of a Persian ironwood tree. The tree was leafless but not lifeless. While others in the gardens were bare-branched and stark, the ironwood’s vibrant red blossoms stood out against the snow.

The image stayed with Entwisle. It prompted him to plant a Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica) at his home in Melbourne, where it thrives, out of place, in the heart of an orderly garden.

“It’s an interesting, intriguing tree,” he says. “It doesn’t fit, but growing reminds me of that time at Kew.”

You can read the story in the Guardian. (No paywall.)

'Gloriously gnarly': what professional botanists plant at home