Touring renowned botanist Kingsley Dixon’s stunning property | My Garden Path | Gardening Australia

We meet Professor Kingsley Dixon, AO, a botanist whose devotion to science has transformed our understanding of native plant cultivation. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
He lives on a 160-acre garden and bush block south of Perth, in the Darling Range. This is the passion project of Professor Dixon, an internationally recognised botanist who revolutionised native plant cultivation and is now cultivating a botanic garden of his own. Kingsley, his husband Lionel, and their dog, Rufus, have been working on this historic garden for almost 10 years, lovingly restoring the 12 acres of formal gardens, amassing collections of native and exotic plants, and observing the unique wet temperate forest surrounding it.  

Kingsley has decades of important contributions to plant science in Australia, and created the Science and Research department at Kings Park, which he helmed for 32 years. Most notably, he led the team that discovered it was not heat or ash from a bushfire that stimulated the germination of so many Australian plants, but chemicals found in the smoke. This year, he was recognised for his contribution to Australian plant science, receiving an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). He was also Western Australia’s Scientist of the Year in 2016, and was featured in David Attenborough’s BBC Private Life of Plants documentary series.  

Kingsley grew up in Bayswater, in the eastern suburbs of Perth. ‘My family loved gardening but we were really working class. My dad was a tractor driver but he collected water lilies, we were always building lily ponds!’ His family were largely unaware of native plants though, as were many people at the time.

“My first experience working with native plants was in the summer holidays of 1965/1966. I was 12 years old and had nothing to do, so I would sit in the car with my father while he worked as a bulldozer driver for the rubbish dump. Every day, we drove by a sign for Wyemando Native Plant Nursery, and I finally built up the courage to ask him to drop me off there in the morning and pick me up on his way home from work. I walked into this nursery and asked if I could help out.”

The two sisters who ran it, Nancy and Susan Harper, begrudgingly obliged, and his mind was opened to the wonderful world of native plant cultivation.

“Working there exposed me to extraordinary diversity that impressed me so much. I wanted to find magical places that they talked about seeing and collecting plants.” This obsession motivated him through his studies.

Along with a team of colleagues from Kings Park and the Universities, he undertook an 11-year study to identify the specific chemical in smoke that is responsible for germination. More than 4000 chemicals in smoke were analysed. This led to the discovery in 2004 of a new class of molecules that they named karrikinolides, after the Noongar word for smoke, ‘Kerrick’. Karrikinolides were the first new class of plant growth regulation hormones discovered in 30 years, and are now used in the common horticultural product, smokewater. “Few other single ecological findings have had such a profound impact across so many areas of Australian ecology.’”

Kingsley has also led significant research in the study and cultivation of native terrestrial orchids. He was one of the scientists who studied the link between orchids and their mycorrhizal fungi, which are crucial to their growth. In the field as well, he was the first to describe at least 3 species of orchid, and Caleana dixonii, the Sandplain Duck Orchid, was first identified by and later named after him.  

His research now largely focuses on rebuilding landscapes, such as mine site rehabilitation.

At home, he is also excited to have grown one of Western Australia’s rarest plants, a carnivorous aquatic species called the Waterwheel Plant that traps small insects and animals in the water.

Filmed on Pindjarup Country in Waroona, WA
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KINGSLEY DIXON: As a kid, a garden like this was my dream. It’s got water, it’s got a brook. It has beautiful greenery. It has good soils for native species and for many exotic species. So this was really a garden waiting quite late in my gardening career,

But no finer way to actually round off a botany and gardening life than to have a place like this. The garden is a constant source of challenges, but I guess, for gardeners, that’s what gets us out of bed every day and keeps you inspired.

I’m Kingsley Dixon, I’m a botanist, and I’m also a passionate gardener. This place is just an hour south of Perth. It’s in the Darling Range. It’s a really unusual place because it has weather, I guess, pretty much like Tasmania. The garden itself sits at the bottom of a deep valley,

And that provides us with this unique microclimate. The hills rise to about 330m on all sides of us, so it’s deep, it’s often dark. So the tree ferns are really unusual. We’ve got a very large number of them, in the many thousands. The deep valley, the rich soils and the permanent water

Have really created for them the perfect location that you would find in any parts of Victoria. Because we’re embedded in the Lane Poole Nature Reserve and because of the steepness, we have a continuous forest all the way through to the forest in that nature reserve.

The 12 acres of garden that we have here is a lot of work, but, you know, it’s the cheapest gym membership in the world. So my husband, Lionel, has been along for the entire journey. We were married in this very garden.

The whole thing is done as a perfect partnership between the pair of us. It couldn’t have happened any other way. It was having a botanically inclined family that I think led me into really appreciating plants and wildlife. But it was always the plants. And by the time I was eight years old,

I had my own little shade house with my own little collection of plants. When I was 12 years old, the summer holidays had started, and there was this sign for a nursery, and it said Native Plant Nursery, and I had found my mentors for the next stage of my life,

Which was really learning about native plants and the complexity. During my whole university career, I spent those three years in my undergraduate course revelling and really starting to understand how plants grow and operate, and then went on to a PhD with a wonderful professor,

John Pate, and together we stayed in research for about 30 years, including the time when I got my dream job, which of course was my position at King’s Park. But when that position came up for a display botanist and I managed to get it, I really thought this was my toe in

To actually becoming a botanist, doing research in a botanic garden. We were the first people to develop sophisticated tissue culture and the first people to do the cryo storage. That’s the liquid nitrogen freezing of threatened species. It was a great interest of mine. It took us many years to finally crack it.

We were running a restoration research lab. About a third of native species we couldn’t germinate, but they came up after a fire. And we started some research, following on from a lead from some South African colleagues, and in 1995, we published the paper showing that in fact, smoke,

Not heat and ash, was the major stimulator which makes the Western Australian and most Australian bushland areas burst into growth and blooming. Following that, with some amazing PhD students, I said, “Let’s find the chemical. I’m sure we can do that.” That was 11 years of hard slog

Until, in 2004, we finally cracked it and made the world announcement – a new molecule to science. We called it karrikinolide, ‘karrik’ from smoke, the Noongar word for smoke, and ‘olide’ refers to the chemical nature of the molecule that we discovered. And it’s on the backbone of that that we developed

One of the largest restoration research groups in Australia, which today we carry on with my new position at Curtin University, which I joined in 2015, which is leading Australia in the science of rebuilding damaged landscapes. One of the great joys in my life is being able to merge

That professional interest with, of course, my gardening interests. We experimented in the first year with seeing whether natives would grow, because it was wet, quite dark, with quite rich soils for native species. But the advantage of the site that we’ve now put the native gardens through is one that was all cleared,

So we’re left with this bare soil, but it was north-facing and it’s free-draining. So I thought, “This is the magic,” because with natives, as long as they can get down to deep water, they don’t want to be waterlogged, and they want warmth and sunshine, we could probably win.

So it’s essentially a native garden for all seasons and all places. So one of the great joys is, this garden, I’ve been able to grow one of Western Australia’s rarest plants. It’s this little aquatic plant. This is in its dormant phase. And soon as the weather warms up, it’ll start developing

These big leaves, which are essentially Venus flytraps that trap small, unsuspecting animals in the water. And that’s the way they get their nitrogen and their phosphorus. So it’s the waterwheel plant, aldrovanda, and it’s a species that’s become very rare because it depends upon high water quality. But we’ve got abundant water here,

So I’m able to grow this very successfully. We’d like to think that the garden has elements of the Impressionist garden. It picks up elements of Monet, and we were so thrilled to finally build our mini version of a Monet bridge across one of the streams.

But, of course, Monet had a great fascination with things Japanese, and so we’ve carried the theme of the Japanese ethic in some parts of the garden, in terms of the simplicity of plantings, but it’s very much done through a European gardening and Australian gardening style.

But along the way, we’ve been able to do things to really create that true Japanese feel. And the building of the teahouse has been a long term vision of ours, and we’re really thrilled now that it’s finally done and we can finally have cups of tea in a proper teahouse.

They call it matcha. Gardening is one of those basic human instincts that connects you with nature. As my Noongar colleagues say, it connects you to the land and to the spirit of the country. And gardening in a place like this is one of the most uplifting things I’ve ever done in my life.

And it’s one of the things we look forward to each weekend. God, we’re sick of picking up sticks, raking leaves, fallen trees, pulling the weeds. But at the end of each day, we’ll have a little drink somewhere, in a special part of the garden, and always we get reminded

That it’s all been worthwhile and that the garden is giving back much more than we’ve put into it.