THE first thing I did when we moved into our home in Tasmania's Tamar Valley was to plant an eight-metre wide border around most of the 3ha property.
Roughly 1000 Australian trees and shrubs went in as tiny seedlings, directly from the tubes where they had been growing.
It was late winter and with the spring rains, they needed no watering.
By summer, they had formed enough roots to cope with the dry.
A few succumbed and were instantly replaced.
It was because of this ability to survive that I chose eucalypts, blackwoods, tea-trees, paper barks, grevilleas, banksias and other natives.
After the initial watering, they have been forced to survive on normal rainfall.
Almost 30 years later, our bit of land is partly surrounded by a lovely mixed forest, which creates a perfect microclimate.
While providing protection from wind, the forest border also reduces the severity of frosts.
And of course, every plant is an experiment in a way.
Sadly, my efforts to grow the Australian plants I love most - those astonishingly beautiful arid zone Mallee eucalypts - have persistently failed.
Too much rain in late winter and spring.
I intend to try again with my favourite of all plants, the sturdy, diminutive wing-fruited Mallee (Eucalyptus kingsmillii) in the driest, sunniest part of the garden.
Perhaps I love this tree because it seems to reflect my own determination to survive any hardship.
But it does have such beautiful, intriguing flowers.
However, the trouble with most Australian plants is the ease by which they burn.
Too close to a house and they can become a threat during hot, dry periods.
So, I gather up dead branches and other potential fuel and stack them for use as kindling.
Closer to the house are fire-retarding exotics.
They include rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias, and clusters of birches, maples, hydrangeas, viburnum, deutzias, pieris, erica and of course, roses galore.
There is even a perennial border crammed with delphiniums, peonies, achillea, lupins, apricot foxgloves, campanulas, African daisies, foxtail lilies, daylilies, dahlias and every variety of irises.
They have now formed a dense, weed-suppressing, fire-proof ground-cover.
Even showers of sparks can only shrivel the leaves for a while.
There is one exotic plant that always seemed to grow half-heartedly in our garden. It usually grows about a metre in height and width, but seems stunted in Australia.
They call it the wedding cake plant (Kalmia latifolia) because the bright, shell-like flowers look as though they are made of pink-coloured sugar.
Then a few years ago, I went to the Catskills, the wonderful mountain region in the US where these plants grow naturally.
And I remember standing amazed beneath a superb kalmia more than 10 metres tall, in full bloom, growing wild in a maple forest.
So, out of curiosity I tested the acid-alkaline balance (pH) of the soil around the tree.
The surface layer had become quite acidic, due to rotting leaves, but a few centimetres down it had a pH of about 8.5, which is very alkaline.
A couple of years ago, I planted another wedding cake plant.
This time, I spread a thick layer of coarsely-ground dolomite limestone over the base of the planting hole.
The new plant was placed on top of this and I back-filled around the root-ball with acidic, leaf-mould enriched topsoil.
The results have been staggering.
The plant has been covered with so many bright-pink flower trusses it was impossible to see the leaves.
