We visited  the beautiful Eureka garden belonging to Don and Jessica Linney.

In their own words:

We came to our 5 acre bare paddock block 37 years ago from near the Qld border.  We were in the nursery industry so our plan was to set up a wholesale nursery and to plant out the land with a mixture of plants we could use to collect cuttings, seeds and bulbs for use in our nursery.  Over the years we have filled up the whole property with gardens, fruit trees, veggies and lawns.

The plants we grew over the years changed as our customers’ demanded more tropical/Bali garden type plants. We always had a leaning towards the more tropical plants and we eventually changed 90% of what we grew to fit in with this.  For the last 10 years we have specialized in gingers, heliconias, tropical foliage plants and rare tropical and sub-tropical trees and shrubs.

Our passion for plants led us to travel the tropics and to track down and obtain (often through swapping within our network of plant collectors) many rare and unusual plants.  These we propagated where we could and spread them around other avid collectors.

We are now retired from the nursery industry and have the luxury of growing what appeals to us rather than what’s demanded by the general nursery trade.  These days we collect and breed wild species hippeastrum, a genus with so many amazingly unique flowers, light years away from the commonly seen “garden hippeastrums. (To those interested, Google Hippeastrum cybiser or Hippeastrum mandonii).

Someone once said “old gardeners never die, they just slowly compost away”.  I hope they are right!!

Don and Jessica Linney