Interview with a horticultural traveller

from Yates Growing With You New Zealand - Spring Edition 2020

So many flowers

horticultural INTERVIEW WITH A traveller

Learning about gardeners from far flung and exotic locations around the world can be both inspirational and educational and tempt us to put these interesting destinations on our travelling bucket list. Angie Thomas interviewed passionate horticultural lecturer Dan Austin about some of the fantastic places he has visited during his horticultural travels.

What is your ‘day job’ and how did you get started in horticulture?

I guess you could say gardening is in my blood. My grandparents had a small orchard in the Riverland in South Australia, where I spent many school holidays working and firmly caught the horticulture bug.

After finishing high school, I was fortunate enough to land an apprenticeship in horticulture working at TAFESA’s Urrbrae campus. During this time, I negotiated all sorts of training that wasn’t part of my regular timetable and with the extra knowledge, it wasn’t long before I was encouraged to get my teaching qualification and return to the organisation as a trainer.

10 years later and things have gone full circle. My regular day job involves lecturing across a range of horticulture topics and I now coordinate TAFESA’s horticulture apprentices from across the state.

What do you enjoy most about teaching horticulture?

I love getting hands on with plants and being out in the sun (or rain, but it is all part of it). We get tired and we get dirty, but there aren’t many vocations with as many smiles and laughs. The best people are in horticulture and it is great reuniting with graduates in industry and seeing what they have achieved.

How did you begin your horticultural-based travel?

During my apprenticeship, I gained a place in the Yates 6 Pack program with the International Plant Propagator’s Society, which allowed six young people to travel interstate and attend the Society’s annual conference and it was eye opening. I gained exposure to what was happening, not only around Australia but around the world. So, when I learnt the Society also offered an all-expenses paid exchange program to South Africa, I was barely back home before my application was in.

The next year I was on the plane and after the experience of touring South Africa’s nursery industry, I was quickly hooked on horticulturalbased travel.

Over the next few years I did anything I could to experience more of the world of plants abroad, from scholarships to volunteering with AusAID and on and off, I’ve been able to spend around five of the last ten years working in horticulture overseas in some shape or form.

What have been your favourite top three places to visit? And what made these places or people so special?

That’s a really hard question. For adventure, the Solomon Islands are almost trapped in time and as off the beaten track as you can get, while the people in rural Tanzania and Vietnam were undoubtedly the friendliest from my experience, so I have a soft spot for those countries.

From a horticultural perspective though, the innovation in Singapore and Israel is out of this world but I think the most interesting places would have to include:

The Floating Gardens of Inle Lake, Myanmar - where floating beds of decomposed reeds and water hyacinth are used to farm over 61000 tonnes of tomatoes annually, on the lake’s surface.

The eco gardens of Cappadocia, Turkey – where paddock to plate farming allows visitors fresh Mediterranean produce among some of the most surreal geography you will ever see.

The living bridges of Sohra, India- these bridges are found surrounded by caves and waterfalls in one of the wettest (and most beautiful) places on Earth. They have been fostered and developed over hundreds of years and are actually alive, woven from the roots of Ficus elastica.

What can we learn from these people and places?

One thing I’ve noticed over and over, is that the people in the places who have the least, are some of the happiest and most generous. I guess when everyone is content living in the same way, no one is comparing themselves with anyone else or feeling like they are missing out on something and I think that’s a trait we could all adopt.

Once travel restrictions are lifted, where are the places that you would like to visit next?

I think the Amazon would be amazing, the cloud forests of Peru would make a great side trip and the floating villages of Lake Titicaca would be the horticultural icing on the cake, but that is another hard question, the world is a big place and the bucket list is long!

Images courtesy of Dan Austin.