About plant this

PlantThis is the creation of a team that's worked with leading landscape architects and international media services.

Starting with a database – an electronic plant collection built up and tested over a decade – they've developed a re-designed and enlarged version, and launched Australia's most comprehensive plant website for garden makers.

At the heart of PlantThis is the Plant Selector; demystifying both the horticultural and design secrets of creating beautiful gardens. The PlantThis combination of high-level horticulture, design and communications has distilled an approach unlike anything else, anywhere.

The PlantThis Plant Selector is a unique garden matchmaker: your own on-call talkback horticulturalist crossed with a garden design consultant. It can also be used as a digital plant encyclopaedia or identification tool.

Our ever-growing library of handy and direct plant and garden information focuses on small spaces, home grown produce and other green issues in the garden. Along with directories to local nurseries and a members club, PlantThis is set to become the must-go venue for the on-line plant seeking set.

Sebastian Tesoriero - Director

Sebastian grew up with plants.

His grandfather, Sebastiano Lentini, had market gardens at Narrabeen and St Ives, and his vegetables and flowers were sold at the Sydney markets. Sebastian's father, Salvatore (Sam), was one of the many well-known Tesoriero greengrocers of Sydney. The market gardens are now gone but Sam has always maintained a big wog garden. Young Sebastian grew up with avocado trees, plums, lemons, oranges, mandarins, prickly pear, guava, macadamia nuts and a tennis court-sized cage erected around the fig trees. At the age of 10, as a right of passage, he was given a stunted broccoli seedling and a patch of dirt.

After school, Sebastian spent several years unhappily studying law and working as a lawyer. During his time as a government solicitor, working on complex commercial, environmental and immigration cases, he found he had more interest in IT and the collection and storage of data than he did the law.

In 1997, he left the law and began studying horticulture. During his studies he began to compile a database that would eventually keep track of thousands of plants: their characteristics and the conditions they need to flourish. It was also during this time that he met Jamie Durie, who was also beginning a new career in gardening.

Sebastian joined the team at Durie's company PATIO and used the expanding database in his work as a garden designer and horticulturalist. He also worked on several of Durie's best-selling garden books and co-authored The Source Book: Plants, Materials, Products and Ideas.

Sebastian has worked to open his collected plant information to the gardenmakers of Australia and eventually the world. The result is PlantThis.