Learning from our Treasured Botanic Gardens

We have been visiting and learning from botanic gardens for decades and will continue to do so for decades to come, as there is no better place to see a wide range of established plants from all over the world growing in your local climate.

Our Diggers Garden Shop is celebrating its 10th year in the Adelaide Botanic Garden. This partnership between Botanic Gardens South Australia and The Diggers Club is an ongoing success due to the strong alignment of the values and vision of the two organisations. Whilst Diggers is a relative newcomer to the Australian horticultural scene in comparison to the 160-year history of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, there is plenty of common ground, with a reverence for plants at the heart of what we both do.

The connection between Diggers and botanic gardens in Australia is exemplified by the presence of our store in the Adelaide gardens, and we are proud to have forged a strong relationship with botanic gardens in several other Australian capital cities over the last 40 years as well.

You can only learn so much from a screen or a page, so a curious gardener should make as many visits as possible to botanic gardens throughout the year. Whilst our Diggers gardens at Heronswood, The Garden of St Erth and Cloudehill are ‘working gardens’ where members can find living examples of practical, small-scale and achievable gardening for the home gardener, botanic gardens complete the picture with important horticultural resources such as herbariums, exotic plant collections and historic tree plantings.

If you’re after examples of a mini-plot vegetable garden, an espaliered orchard, small-batch seed saving or a cottage perennial flower garden, then a Diggers garden will teach you much. But if you’re after an expansive landscape, plant collections from across the world or a curated display of botanical specimens, then a botanic garden will do the trick. I urge you to visit both Diggers and botanic gardens as frequently as possible – both will make you a better gardener