Now that we are over halfway through our fifth decade, I can see fantastic opportunities ahead, knowing that Diggers members have all the right tools to overcome the alarming concerns about climate warming, as well as enjoying time in the garden!
Diggers has helped hundreds of thousands of gardeners in Australia since we began in 1978. Apart from creating Heronswood, Diggers has become a garden charity, also curating and managing The Garden of St Erth in Blackwood and Cloudehill in the Dandenong Ranges. All three gardens appear in international gardening books, being much more than ‘inspirational’, having now become education centres for a self-sufficient life.
How do we do this?
By being focused on what we do best – gardening. Are you aware that gardening has the solutions to our most urgent problems? Gardeners have one of the longest life expectancies of any occupation. Clearly we enjoy the sunshine, exercise, food and flowers we grow, as well as the artistic challenges! By working the soil, breathing in fresh air and being gardeners, we become part of nature – connecting with the birds, bees and the trees. We are more in harmony with the natural world than almost any other Australians because rather than fighting nature, like miners, politicians and corporates who attempt to control nature, we work with it.
Gardening is the best training for understanding our environment: We build our knowledge patiently, by learning from nature. We understand photosynthesis and how a monumental 100-tonne tree is mostly comprised of gaseous carbon that comes from the air and water to generate mass. It’s not dug up like coal – it’s effortlessly amassing size, day after day, from the sun’s energy.
Gardening is also the best training for building character: We gardeners rarely succeed quickly but that trial-and-error experience builds the knowledge and creates the character, being the foundation of the most important virtues; humility and integrity – the greatest of all
personal attributes.
We began exposing harmful backyard chemicals pushed by Monsanto in the 1990s and remain committed to managing our gardens following organic principles. We never grow crops as monocultures. Unlike large-scale farming, we plant a diverse range of species. Our soils are organic, made from recycling our waste into compost. Our good pests keep the bad pests at bay, which is impossible on modern-day farms because high use of pesticides kills the good bugs as well as the hostile. Biodiversity is our fail-safe mechanism against pest attack, which is why our heirlooms are more resilient from, and have adapted to, insect attack over hundreds of years.
We are passionate about how we garden
If we fail to feel passionate about a plant, then we don’t list it – we can’t sell things we are not passionate about. We are direct marketers. But here’s where we split from the rest of the nursery industry. Box warehouses and nurseries list plants because their goal is to make money. But that is not necessarily our goal; it’s just a means to an end. Rather than a corporate entity or a garden shop, we are a garden club renowned for our advice as much as our products. We only exist because we help gardeners succeed. We are the pioneering content providers for garden-related information.
You can trust that the seeds and plants in our range are proven to be garden-worthy, trialled and tested in our own Diggers gardens since 1978.