Gardening Tips from a 10-Acre Tropical Garden in Zambia | Garden Tour

We visited Diane Ellis, a seasoned gardener in Lusaka, Zambia, who’s managing a stunning 10-acre garden using eco-friendly, water-wise techniques. In this video, she shares practical advice on how to maintain tropical-style gardens in hot, dry climates like Lusaka.

Top Gardening Tips from Diane:
-Shady gardens reduce water use
-Sprinklers, when used correctly, help conserve water
-Compost builds healthy, resilient soil

Whether you’re managing a large landscape or a small backyard, you’ll find valuable inspiration here.

Get gardening inspiration from around Zambia.

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um so my name is Diane and yeah this is my garden um which is my passion yeah my absolute love and always has been I think since I was a little girl uh yeah so we moved to Eureka Park 22 nearly 23 years ago this was just bush lots of lantana covering the trees the trees were all here um and yeah we moved down to the plot and I started landscaping and yeah so my whole aim is to have kept most of the trees we we only took out very few trees where we built um and over the years new young trees have come up and we’ve let them grow and we’ve actually added a few but have stuck with indigenous there’s a handful of non-indigenous trees but majority are indigenous yeah I see this large acacia here yes it’s a beautiful and this is a nut mahogany nutel mahogany we planted this one um and we planted quite a few of them because they’re evergreen um the acacas Yeah the acacas lose their leaves now in winter um so do the albizia versol which is another lovely indigenous tree with a huge canopy but yeah they lose their leaves and the unfortunate thing is they only get their new leaves towards the end of October um which is our hottest time of the year so you go through that hot season with lots of sun so I added in mostly nut mahoggones because they’re evergreen um and they they’re easy the roots don’t damage like if you’ve got structures or um septic tanks or anything near the roots don’t cause any damage the birds love them they get very pretty seeds and attract birds [Music] and so because I’ve kept the trees and kept the majority of trees it obviously creates a very shady garden um so I’ve planted shade loving plants in all the shade areas and of course the advantage with shade gardens is they don’t use nearly as much water as full sun right here in the shade okay I’ve got busy lizies you’re very common impatient or busy lizies which grow literally like weeds and they’re always bright and cheerful and have always got flowers on them even now in the middle of winter and they just pop up their seeds drop and they pop up um they very handy in the shade and they’re so easy to grow or even propagate yeah so what I’ve done in the shade because not many plants flower in the shade I use colored leaves and I’m sure if you just glance around my garden even in the sun areas you’ll see the different combinations of color so over here I’ve got cordelines and denas um there’s a bright pink little cordon the wine red one more red ones green ones the green ones get lovely red berries um and I love how you know just in terms of structure they all have a similar structure leaf shape and stuff so it comes out cord lines together um yeah and then ground covers and so also the other thing this lovely singonium yes pink pink singonium where the leaves come out pink um there are the variegated ones and there’s a almost a white silvery one I’ve got somewhere else in the garden um yeah and then the other thing is all my flower beds the soil is pretty much covered because if you’ve got exposed soil it’s just going to dry out the way I plant um there literally is no empty soil um to see so yeah so basically the leaves provide shade for the ground and so you don’t get the direct sun beating down on it yes mhm um Yeah and then of course the other important thing with trees besides them um giving shade is that they drop leaves and yes a lot of us curse the leaves you know oh we got a rake we got to pick up all the leaves but so in the flower beds we try and just leave the leaves to to sit in the flower beds um and then the lawn we do rake but then they go onto our compost so everything that drops goes back into the soil at some point um if you didn’t don’t have enough trees you’re not going to have enough organic material to make compost so yeah that’s another reason why you need you need a lot of trees okay so in here we’ve got golden fern um I’ve got a few different ferns um that’s a giant maiden hair fern in there and I think this is called a silver break fern so yeah just a few different ferns um I love these shrubs this one’s common name is actually a chocolate bush okay yeah um the pink sudaranthemum you also get variegated um varieties um you’ll see in here I’ve got a Nutell mahogany masakili tree that’s we actually planted there um because I’m a bit worried about the monkey bread the the monkey breads and the acacas don’t live all that long acacas are about 40 years max um yeah so I’ve planted a micili so how old is this muskili um probably 3 years okay yeah and the plan is that it will replace this one i won’t take this one out but if it does die then there’s something else coming up in its place all right so you’re not worried if it’s growing slowly you just No it’s time will come basically yes um and they take a while in the beginning and then they suddenly get their roots into the good soil and off they go yeah so I think that’s a very interesting thing that you’re speaking about cuz a lot of people don’t might not think about it in terms of succession planning if you’re in your garden for a long time How do you make sure you always have trees cuz trees do die um and it takes forever you know to get them to this size i I don’t even want to think about this tree dying this is the center of the entire garden it is you know it’s such a feature so yeah there’s a few like that that are such a feature that I really don’t want to think about it what we have noticed is with the irrigation is if the irrigation goes up against the trunks I think it causes phytora which is a fungus okay um so we we can’t actually stop the irrigation against the tree but the trees that are in the flower beds um because they get a much smaller they don’t actually get the irrigation straight onto their trunks actually seem to do better um okay so avoiding direct watering onto the tree or the tree trunk if you can yes and the other thing is those strimmers you know for trimming the edge of the lawn they kill trees people don’t realize it i’ve actually got a guava tree we might see it later on that was completely ringbarked by a stmer so I have banned my guys from using strimmers around trees they have to use manual cutters because you can ring bark a tree without realizing and once you damage that bark yes yeah so that is another thing you’ve got to protect the bark of the trees okay all right um so back to this bed so we’ve got golden fern here it’s a golden Boston fern sometimes people think it’s sick because it’s pale but it’s actually made like that to to be gold and then you’ve got the gold and I’ve put the dark green next to it i don’t know what this fern is called i just call it rabbit’s foot fern cuz it’s got a bit of a foot that crawls along and it just keeps spreading i’ve heard it referred to as rabbit’s foot as well yeah so that that’s espadistra cast iron plant which does very well in the shade there’s more in there this is a variegated ginger um yeah which I just love and how did you come to your selection of plants was it trial and error or um so a lot of the plants I think come from KZN Nutell well I know them from Kaden that’s where I grew up okay um and they like humidity so Zambia is quite a difficult climate because you have a very wet rainy season and very humid and then you have a very dry season so you’ve got two totally opposites so it’s quite difficult um but in a shady garden the tropical plants do do better so what plants that like humidity do not like is the hot dry air um and often that’s where people go wrong they they want to just sort of put more and more water on the plants whereas what the plants actually want is humidity just that moisture in the air so because we’ve got automatic irrigation in the beds um in the hot dry weather we switch it on for literally 5 minutes and it just picks up the humidity so you know you don’t you don’t need the water on the roots at that point i mean obviously maybe once a week a good soaking um and then just the humidity just a bit of a humidity boost yeah know it’s lovely to see the little ecosystem you have cuz you can see the plants are quite you know living quite happily together complenting each other and also the one thing I do like um or the one thing I have noticed is the layers you have in your garden you know it’s not just trees and some beds there’s so much dimension um to how you shaped it yeah so um yeah I think my beds what I did when we first moved in here um so I literally um collected a nursery of plants and had them here under the trees and then I kind of used the trees to shape the beds so I like my beds to be natural to follow a natural shape natural curves so I’ve I’ve kind of followed the shade um of the trees um most of in most of the places what is this this looks very interesting vivid green leaves yeah it’s a canthus i think it’s called a canthus mollis or wild rhubarb um yeah it’s being a little bit eaten at the moment but it’s just a seasonal thing i think it gets a bit of a fungus now in winter and gets a little bit chewed but I’ll just cut those yes it’s evergreen i’ll just cut the damaged leaves off and you can see all the new ones coming um yeah and I love how it contrasts that deep green with the white of the sonium the pale white singium and then there’s a burgundy jugger there the shrimp plant i’ve got quite a few different colors of shrimp plant they almost always have flowers on them and then this is a a flax i think they call it in New Zealand flax formium i’m not too sure of the name so that is a feature plant so in landscaping um you need some feature plants because like if you look at the the sort of overall bed um there’s just lots of different shrubs and round plants and whatever but every now and then you need a striking feature plant so I’ve put the flax on the end of the bed it’s a feature and I guess the stitia is a bit of a feature draws your eye um and then also the other thing with landscaping if you’ve got a big enough garden but you can actually do it even in a small garden is to create interest you shouldn’t actually see the whole garden in one glance um so the way I’ve done it is I’ve put some beds so that it encourages you to go around and see what’s behind that bed um if you need needing to do it on a smaller scale you can actually just have a bigish plant or shrub um if you can’t if you don’t have space to put a whole bed you put a bigish plant or shrub which encourages you to then walk around that shrub to see what’s on the other side yeah I’ve heard I’ve heard something similar in terms of garden rooms like literally you move into a physically different like garden design but just encouraging you to explore as opposed to cuz I think a lot of people actually don’t go out into their gardens they sit on the ver cuz they can see everything from the veranda whereas here you know to appreciate what’s at the back you have to come and then you see this huge clump of um ginger yes yeah and and this just diversity of leaf shapes leaf colors i can see huge splash of red there um and then you have your a very dark green there’s the green at the bottom this is mondo grass which is lovely in the shade and dogs love it dogs love to lie on it especially in the hot weather and it doesn’t actually squash so you know as long as they’re not running through it every day i’ve heard this referred to as a good lawn alternative because it’s quite water-wise so if you have a small garden and you don’t want you can get the miniature one so that’s great and it’s great between pavers yeah so that’s definitely something I would encourage people to try in their beds or as a grass if you have a small courtyard mhm oh wow and then we come into this open space here so this is a lot more um full sun area okay um Yeah so it does use a bit more water um yeah but you do also need some full sun oh yeah yeah yeah so this is definitely more a sunny bed there’s the red flag which I love that’s That’s quite a nice sort of feature shrub just on its own yeah the red one and you could do also get the white one and you get a lovely pale pink one i don’t actually This is actually quite interesting sorry if I could have a look cuz this actually looks like the leaves of it yes are these the leaves cuz it’s very hard to distinguish yeah I think it is just a leaf because the whatever it is that the um gets pollinated is in there that’s the actual flower so yeah it’s just I don’t know if it’s like an adapted leaf to attract the pollinators so and I must say you have a lot of plants in your garden yes I know it’s been 20 years but just in terms of the number of how did it cost a lot what did you do to get around firstly I ran a garden center in Indola so so you had the plant yes and yeah so I was always looking for new plants at that stage we used to go to Zimbabwe and bring in new stock of plants um yeah and then I’ve got my own green houses so we grow pretty much all our own plants there’s a few things that we struggle with um but generally we just keep planting so if I want to add a new bed or I want to change something in a bed or if something gets damaged or old then I’ve got the greenhouse I’ve got my stock and I just you know get from there i think actually that’s a very good tip for people who have a new space they want to fill in you know before you get there start propagating your plants cuz this is hundreds of thousands of plants that you have in this space it is and um the thing is when we clean out the beds because obviously everything needs a bit of grooming from time to time things get big and they lose shape or what happens in beds like this is to keep it landscaped you’ve got to keep things in their place and a lot of people don’t understand that they let they let a mango tree come up in there and a guavaga tree come up in there and whereas they actually need to be moved or taken out and then also certain plants will encroach on the others so I teach my guys this fern needs to stay in this area you mustn’t let it spread and cover all the others and then with doing that you’re always removing plants so you’re cutting back or you’re actually pulling out or digging out so you’ve got all these plants so we just keep planting them into the greenhouse and then again with making our own compost all I use in the greenhouse is our compost i know potting soil they say is supposed to be one/3 river sand one/3 compost and one/3 pine bark or yeah a bark um but we just use straight compost and it’s works very well i think for root development something with good um irration you know that allows that’s quite porous and compost works for that and is highly nutritious so it does make a lot of sense we don’t s our compost very fine um so it does have some bits and pieces of bark and stick and whatever in but it’s actually quite good like that because even digging it back into the beds it creates a bit of it loosens the soil and you know keeps the soil irrated yeah and I think that’s exactly what you need for living soil you know cuz then your worms can live in there your fungi can grow [Music] and then you come into Almost another garden yeah I love this what is this yeah this is a sanchchezia very easy to grow they grow very easily in the shade they like the shade actually prefer shade to sun i love them um because they grow fast they’re very easy to trim because they’re soft so you’re not getting scratched by thorns and hard branches and they they’re just easy to to cut um and then the new leaves come out with a lot more color um hasn’t really there’s a the younger ones so the young leaves and then the the flowers are very pretty as well so lovely yeah I really love them and um you can see from the type of flower they would attract probably sunbirds because they you know they come up the long narrow the nectar yeah and that is the other advantage with a garden with a huge variety of plants is the different birds we have such a huge variety of birds and it has increased over the years that we’ve been here and we are seeing more and more exotic different we’ve even even had the narina trogan I think it is um in our garden we spotted him once he’s very shy but the most beautiful bird and it’s not seen very often in Zambia at all and we’ve had one in our garden quite a few other rare birds um yeah in a way it’s a little bit sad because they’re obviously moving in because their habitats are being destroyed elsewhere um but we’ve got a huge range of habitats just on this 10 acres because we’ve got our shady garden with all the various plants um for pollen and seeds and all the different fruits that the birds um like and then um next door on our plot we’ve got our bush meander which is completely indigenous we don’t irrigate it at all and we actually have a different variety of birds that go there so yeah we’ve got the whole spect range spectrum yeah but I do like what you say cuz there is the whole idea of just creating islands or sanctuaries for insects birds creatures small animals bush babies we have genet we have giant rats the African giant rat lots of them they can be a bit of a pest but we just let them carry on they dig great big tunnels under the plants um yeah and then the bird life um yeah so the birds and the animals I think like the sort of environment where there’s a lot of thick bush they can easily hide so our dogs might chase the birds every now and then they don’t kill them um Leila has a game with the wagtails they come and chase them and that’s what they’re doing now so they chase them but but the birds know that they can escape to somewhere so they perfectly happy and the genet bush babies all know that they are safe here so it’s because there’s place for them to hide oh that’s so funny look at that i think the birds are teasing them you know they’re not really you know but what I’ve done with all our houses on the property is I don’t like just walls around the house or just a hedge so I’ve created beds and they’re quite thick beds and then with lots of tall shrubs um and it provides an effective screen yes um so it’s it’s nice and natural i mean you can just see birds everywhere and then I have put some walls but I’ve kind of just mixed them because I don’t want just wallsid and they they’re hard looking and Yeah and I think even the the tenants themselves would appreciate the openness that this gives them it gives you the feeling it kind of joins all the gardens together and creates lots of shared spaces yeah so it’s literally houses with their own gardens and then set in a park situation really yeah and everybody can come you know they they they’ve got the privacy of their own gardens but they come out and they wander around through the whole tenant and who does the maintenance your guys come in and and maintain or they bring um we pretty much do our own so we’ve got Douglas who’s our driver and maintenance guy um my husband is very hands-on but he works full-time at the company but he teaches Douglas all the he’s my husband’s very electrical he’s electrical engineer okay so but he’s he’s into everything he’s over the years he’s I mean I can you don’t just have a place like this without knowing something oh no it’s believe me it’s constant maintenance so yeah the only time we call in companies is that for the generator and for the aircons you know it’s very specialized but otherwise we pretty much do our own maintenance do you know the name of this see do you know the name of this it’s uh called Hoffmania funny name look at this those velvety leaves can you see this how how it shines i don’t know what is under this tree or whether it comes from the tree but so many things I plant under this tree get eaten so there was one of these over there it’s not by the trampoline and there was nothing eating it but yeah it’s lovely the way it’s got the red under the leaf as well so like as it blows or in the sun the red sort of shines through very pretty just very tropical shrub there’s the yellow poinsettia flowering now oh I didn’t know there was a yellow one yeah so you definitely can’t go to a garden center in one trip and come up with all these plants this has been decades of collecting and propagating yeah so this is the bush meander so what is the idea behind the bush meander so here we’ve we don’t irrigate we just left it completely wild um so that the trees because it worries us a bit you know with irrigating trees that they they don’t really like that it’s not their natural way and so we might not get the trees regenerating enough when you walk through here in the rainy season and then you walk through in the dry season it is completely different in the rainy season you literally can’t see you know through here it’s all just thick lush like grasses low lush green grasses um yeah now it’s a bit dry but huge amount of bird life and hopefully lots of trees regenerating and I think um we spoke about biodiversity and I think that’s one of the things in terms of our indigenous plants provide um food to indigenous species cuz there’s insects and birds that pretty much evolves to feed off certain plants so if we only have exotic gardens with lawns um there’s a lot of native wildlife some we don’t even know yet that will just die away slowly there’s such a variety of trees on this plot it’s incredible yeah and I’m guessing that’s why there’s such a variety of birds you know indigenous planting indigenous gardens can also be a feature yes you know people go and they pay $200 to go sleep overnight at a safari lodge so they can get this food yes yeah so we have our little cottage there where we have we have on Airbnb and so this is right next to it too so so they can enjoy people that are from outside Zambia can come and experience the indigenous yeah cuz I do have a lot of people saying to me why don’t you grow an indigenous garden but to grow indigenous in Zambia all year through I mean this is what you would have now and for me it’s just you know I don’t like dust and and I want to walk barefoot on the lawn and just just that sort of comfort i suppose that’s what I’ve grown up with i mean there are some indigenous plants that flower but I don’t think the industry is big enough yet that you’d be able to find things that are like in flower all year round yeah and you know so like in South Africa especially on the coast you can grow an indigenous garden because you you get a bit of rain your rainy season might be the hot season or over December whatever but you’ll get the odd shower through the year so things stay green so even if you don’t have lawn you’ve still got green but in Zambia because it’s such a harsh climate and it’s the very wet rainy season and the very hot dry it’s you know the two total opposites you you just can’t have that so it’s quite difficult to you know I mean I accept it when I go to Langra or LoBZ whatever i accept this is what it’s like but I couldn’t live with it you know around my house all the time but it’s nice to just a nice little patch here you see He’s our bee huh there you go which we need to establish if it’s got honey do you do anything special for the bees like uh water or whatever or they f for themselves yeah mhm i think they would find water fairly close by um because we irrigate around these i’ve got quite a lot of indigenous orchids around i don’t go and collect them in the bush but I had a friend whose husband was working on a new huge huge farm that they were developing up near Sesi and they literally just chopped down all these trees and they all had orchids on so she brought me this whole range of orchids and said “Please try and save them.” So I’ve put them all over i put lots through here and we just watered them the first few months that I got them and then the rains came and I thought “Okay so now by after the rains they should be settled.” Um no it’s doing really well you can see that it’s um it’s latching already so I put them kind of at this height because that’s where the irrigation reaches them um yeah because I think up you know sesy way is a lot more humidity and moisture in the forests than what we get here so yeah i mean there’s a lot of different ones and I’ve just put them all around and I just figured if I can just save them