Story: Beautiful Boronias
Episode: 1
Presenter: Trevor Cochrane
Air Date: 21 August 2021

One plant that stands out for its incredible beauty, and often perfume in the late winter and early spring must be the Boronia. Trevor takes us to Kings Park to see how these beautiful flowers are being bred.

• Geraldton Wax, or waxflowers, have been reproduced through a breeding program run by Kings Park Botanical Garden in Perth Western Australia.
• A new and improved range of truly beautiful waxflowers have been released and are already starting to sell out across Australian Garden Centres.
• The Kings Park Plant Development team has released its second Bornonia Hybrid, the ‘Plum Bells’.
• This variety is a hybrid between the white bell-flowered form of Boronia heterophylla known as ‘Moonglow’ and B. megastigma, the famous highly fragrant brown and yellow-flowered species from the south-west of Western Australia.
• The flowers on ‘Plum Bells’ are bell-shaped, similar to both its parents and different to the first release from the Boronia development program, ‘Magenta Stars’, which has star-shaped flowers.
• The Kings Park Plant Development team are developing hardier and longer flowering plants that will thrive in home gardens across Australia.
• Boronia are very shallow rooted and thrive when their root zone is kept cool and the soil has adequate organic matter.
• With the right care, Boronias can be grown in containers. This enables growers to move their Boronias to different positions in accordance with wind direction,  to maximise fragrant release.

For more information, head to:
www.helixaustralia.com.au