‘Sharing stories with children is a privilege for me,’ says Costa Georgiadis

Costa Georgiadis, the host of ABC TV’s popular Gardening Australia, drew on some very personal inspiration for his second book.

Costa Georgiadis knows the importance of planting the seed early.

The Bondi-based gardening guru, TV presenter and now children’s author’s passion for all things green came from his Greek grandparents who grew, nurtured and raised what they loved – Costa, and their adored garden among them.

His new book Costa’s Garden – the first in a four-part children’s series – does the same for budding green thumbs.

It paints a picture, ever so lovingly, as his grandparents did, about a flower garden through the seasons, the joy natural wonders bring and how we can feed life to make it grow.

He’s proud because passing down his passion to the next generation of gardeners was always the dream.

“The house you see in the book, 59 Memory Lane, was actually my grandparents’ house – 59 Daley Rd. Everything I wrote about that, the front yard … she just drew it,” he says of the book’s illustrator, Brenna Quinlan.

“That’s exactly how my grandparents’ house was.

“I used to walk around the gardens and the streets with my grandparents and they were always looking and saying, ‘Oh, look at that’, ‘Look at that rose’, or ‘Look at that flower over there’, and they would always be keen to snap a bit off and take it home. They just had so much love for it.

“They’d go, ‘I’ll put that in the ground’, and I’d come back and, sure enough, there would be something growing up.

“I don’t know how, I don’t know what super powers they had, but I think that’s the nice part – and I love the line (in the book), that flowers have super powers. I think that was the motivation.”

Costa Georgiadis says his passion for all things green came from his Greek grandparents. Picture: Bega Valley Shire Council

After his first book, Costa’s World, he knew the next one had to be for children.

Just like the sunflowers he’s planted at his local primary school and in front of his Bondi home – complete with a log bench for quiet enjoyment – sometimes, it’s all about the kids.

“That’s the kind of a world that I’m immersed in every week with everything that I do, particularly with Get Grubby TV and Dirtgirl and Scrapboy and dirtgirlworld, but then also with Gardening Australia Junior.

“So away we went. Flowers are big and colourful and engaging … some people would think, well, you should start with seed and soil, because that seems logical, but Brenna and I agreed that from a drawing point of view, and from an opening of a series point of view, we’d go with flowers, so that’s how that was born.

“And the more you go into it, the more you realise flowers are in every corner of our life. They’re there in the food that we eat, they cradle culture in so many ways.”

Georgiadis is a landscape architect, environmental educator and TV presenter who has an all-consuming passion for plants and people.

He knows how to bring out the best in each and takes great pleasure in bringing them together.

As co-creator and host of Costa’s Garden Odyssey for SBS, he caught the attention of a nation. For the past 11 years he has continued his journey as the much-loved host of one of the ABC’s most iconic and Logie award-winning programs, Gardening Australia.

Costa Georgiadis says he hopes his new book inspires children to put their “nature goggles” on. Picture: Paul Harris

His presenting work with Gardening Australia has been acknowledged with a Silver Logie for most popular presenter and he’s continued to guide the next generation of junior green thumbs on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia Junior.

“Nothing makes my heart sing more than to interact with children,” he says.

“Sharing stories with children is a privilege for me. It’s an opportunity to encourage engagement with the world, to inspire kids to put their nature goggles on and to see, smell, touch, listen and taste the world.

“To ask questions, to get to know and stand side-by-side with the environment. Just fall in love with nature. What I’m really most happy about is that as a parent or a teacher or an aunt or uncle reading it, the kids can look at that page and go, ‘Oh, well, what’s that about?’, or ‘What’s that insect he’s riding – let’s look that up.’

“I want to pass this on … that’s where all of that love grew, because my grandparents were the same,” he says.

“(My grandmother) would just pick stuff and share stuff and grow stuff. I remember her fig tree was just nuts and the details of flowers that I found in the whole process (for the book) … the more I wrote, the more I appreciated just how intertwined they are in our lives, not just from a survival point of view, but from a cultural point of view.”

At the moment, Georgiadis has quite a lot growing, besides his book.

Costa's Garden is Georgiadis’s new book dedicated to his grandparents.

“I’m nurturing my sunflower patch which I do every year on the nature strip, which grows a forest of sunflowers with a little path and a couple of logs that the children can sit on in the forest – I’ve been doing that for quite a few years, and I do it down at my local school.

“We call it the guardians of the sunflowers. We get the kindies to plant some sunflowers, they grow them up, and then they plant them in the ground … so when they come in, they get the happiness of sunflowers and that helps deal with their anxiousness of first days of school.

“I’ve also got early tomatoes in my balcony garden and I’m about to plant all of these capsicums, a cucumber … we’re growing a Greek salad.”

Costa’s Garden, published by ABC Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books, is out December 4