- Monty starts his tour of Australia in Syndey, like colonization did, initially struggling to establish any agriculture. A public park and royal botanical gardens demonstrate how most ornamental plants were introduced from Europe, the home country (which in turn imported from elsewhere). A seemingly wild native plants park in the desert calls to contemplate what a garden is. Next Melbourne, the country's gardening capital. Finally overseas to New Zealand.—KGF Vissers
- Monty's travels through Oceania take him to both Australia and New Zealand, where the earliest cultivated gardens grew out of the British colonizers' wish for a taste of home, especially in the probability that, being on the other side of the world, they would never see Britain again. In importing plants from home, they recreated what they knew, but were gardening in a much different climate: warmer and generally drier. As such, they were turning their backs on the native flora. With climate change making things even warmer and drier, current day gardeners are needing to adapt to use native plants. The major exception among Monty's travels is the Australian outback, where any cultivated garden needs to withstand the hot, dry conditions, with many native plants having deep root systems in their search for water, which if available is usually deep subsurface in nature. While many unfamiliar with the region would assume otherwise, New Zealand is a much different situation to Australia both in terms of its colonization and climate, with a unique native flora of its own. The early colonizers of New Zealand generally razed the land for fields on which sheep and cattle could graze. It isn't until Monty travels into an old growth temperate rainforest that he sees what the New Zealand landscape was before it was razed. In turning to native plants, modern gardeners could look toward the aborigine in Australia and the Maori in New Zealand, some who still grow and use native plants as they have for centuries.—Huggo
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