Plants down

Jane Emerick
LIKE many settled 33-year-olds, Lyle Filippe typifies the seasoned Aussie backpacker.
He sports a ponytail and patchy beard from past travels and still loves wearing flannels.
Lyle has journeyed to Africa, South America and the United States but with a difference.
His were explorations to discover plants.
Succulents – plants that store more water than they use – fascinate Lyle.
“I went to all these dryland countries to see these sorts of plants grow,” he explains.
“I wanted to see a diversity of plants in their habitats to see what they look like and hopefully I could bring them back here.”
A part of the six-month odyssey in 1998 took him to the deserts in Namibia to marvel at welwitschia mirabilis, which can live for a thousand years.
He’s since uncovered rare aeonian plants from the Canary Islands and transplanted them back in Geelong.
Lyle is now something of a gardening freak, so much so that ABC’s Gardening Australia requests his unique insight on its weekly television programs to discuss dryland plants.
They are low-maintenance, use little water and their foliage and structure remains intact 12 months a year, maintaining colour, shape and texture.
Lyle now has a collection of between 4000 and 5000 plants on his nursery at Lara – so he thinks.
“I’ve never ever counted them but there would be a lot,” Lyle believes.
“I could (count them) but it would take quite a while.
“I know them all and exactly where they all are.”
Lyle attributes his passion for plants – of all kinds – to his family.
They managed a grape and citrus block at Robinvale in the Sunraysia region before moving to Grovedale two decades ago.
After time in national parks while studying natural resources, Lyle found he loved his work at a Wallington nursery.
Lyle and wife Cheryl then started propagating plants in their backyard.
They sold them at markets on weekends and hoped to buy a nursery five years down the track.
“After two years we’d outgrown it, hit the wall and couldn’t find any more room,” Lyle smiles.
The experience inspired him to buy the former Lara Plant Farm in 2001.
The 2.4-hectare site was a shadow of its former glory that once attracted families on weekends.
“I hadn’t ever actually been there before,” Lyle admits.
“It had been up for sale for quite a while and nobody wanted it because it was run down, losing money and needed huge amounts of work to clean it up.
“I came in one day, had a look and could see the potential.”
Lyle now plans to turn the re-named Roraima Nursery into more of a tourist attraction to include tearooms and display houses.
Garden sheds will also be replaced with grand “architectural” structures.
Lyle can visualise the dream.
“I’ll have a showhouse over there,” he points to the distance, “which I’m going to put up as an iron structure like the Eiffel Tower.
“It will be something that people will see from the highway going past and thinking, ‘what the hell is that?’.”