Yuruga
Australian Native Plant Specialists

Being told you should plant natives sounds a lot like you’re being told to give up junk food and switch to brussels sprouts and bran. It makes you feel like you’ll be going on a garden diet. Lush green foliage and the pretty flowers will be a thing of the past. There will be no more planting of self indulgent cordylines, hibiscus, gardenias or gingers. You’re now restricted to a gardening diet of gumtrees, paperbarks, grasstrees, and if you’re good, a grevillea or two. And you’ll have to tear up your lush green lawn so you can replace it with a nice deep layer of bush mulch with a couple of clumps of prickly Spinifex and a mandatory frog pond.

Continue reading The Native Garden Diet…

Not all of us are green thumbed, but without green thumbs you’re left with few options as to how you make use of the area around your home. You can pay someone to come in and take care of your landscaping and garden maintenance, or you can have a fairway garden that is 100 per cent treeless lawn. Actually the latter isn’t a bad idea if you’re renting your investment property to a group of JCU students, as it leaves more room for backyard parties and provides space for additional parking on the lawn.

Continue reading The Brown-Thumbed Garden…

Smelling the sweet scent of a delicate flower is usually associated more with youthful innocence, femininity and romance than it is with masculinity.

Continue reading Fragrant Gardening For Blokes…

This article is extracted from Yuruga Newsletter
Vol 15 No 1 (January 2007)

Here at Yuruga Nursery, we’ve been roaming Cape York Peninsula for over 25 years, collecting and recording the flora of this fantastic wilderness situated right on our doorstep.

Continue reading Exploring the flora of Cape York…

This article is extracted from Yuruga Newsletter
Vol 14 No 1 (March 2006)

Here at Yuruga Nursery we propagate all the plants that we sell, right here on our own premises. We do this in our Production Section, which is ‘down the back’ since, as a NIASA accredited nursery, it is important that we keep this area protected against the inadvertent introduction of pests and diseases into our production systems.

Continue reading Propagating native plants: Seeds or cuttings?…

This article is extracted from Yuruga Newsletter
Vol 14 No 1 (March 2006)

The hills of the Herberton-Irvinebank area of north Queensland contain a wealth of fascinating and delightful native plants, from tall trees to small shrubs. Some are well-known and quite common, others are extremely rare. Take a drive from Herberton to Irvinebank one Sunday afternoon and explore for yourself.

Continue reading The Herberton – Irvinebank Area: a plant lover’s delight…

These articles are extracted from the Yuruga Newsletter
Vol 13 No 1 (December 2005).

Traditionally, native plants are sold in two pot sizes: tubes and 140mm pots.

Tubes, being smaller, are cheaper to buy and easier to plant than pots, and so are quite an attractive proposition for gardeners. So why do we here at Yuruga Nursery sell most of our plants in 140mm pots and not in tubes?

Continue reading Pot size: Yes, (the right) size matters!…

These articles are extracted from the Yuruga Newsletter
Vol 13 No 1 (December 2005).

Lots of people like to build up their garden beds by adding extra soil. This is a very popular approach to gardening, particularly where your original soil is quite poor or if it is poorly drained.

However, there are serious traps for the unwary, so here’s our advice to you ..

Continue reading Building up your garden beds with “manufactured” soil….

This article is extracted from the Yuruga Newsletter
Vol 12 No 4 (December 2004).

The focus of this article is for gardeners in tropical Australia.
However, the basic principles apply for throughout Australia
with minor modifications for local conditions.

Native gardens all across the tropics are bursting into bloom for Christmas.

Here in our Yuruga gardens we have four different native cassias in flower all at once, making a blaze of yellow and orange hues against the bright blue summer sky and a beautiful carpet of fallen petals scattered on our lawns and pathways. What an absolute delight!

Continue reading Christmas in a native garden…

This article is extracted from the Yuruga Newsletter
Vol 12 No 3 (August 2004).

The focus of this article is for gardeners in tropical Australia.
However, the basic principles apply for throughout Australia
with minor modifications for local conditions.

Continue reading Native Birds need Native Plants…