Looking for a Celebrity Garden Adviser

We are looking for one person. Not an agency, not an influencer package — one Melbourne gardener whose own patch is worth showing other people, and who can explain in plain words how they got it that way.

We are calling the role our Celebrity Garden Adviser. Here is exactly what it is, what it is not, and how to put your hand up.

Why we're doing this

Garden Advice was started so the practical side of what we sell had somewhere to live — how deep to lay mulch, which sand goes under pavers, what to do with heavy clay. It works, but it is written by the people who load the trucks. What it does not have is a gardener's own voice: someone who has made the mistakes in their own soil, in this climate, and can say so.

That is the gap we want to fill, and we would rather fill it with one real person we work with properly than with a rotating cast of paid posts.

What you'd actually do

• Front a handful of Garden Advice pieces a year. Seasonal guides, one big project followed start to finish, honest answers to the questions customers actually ask us.
• Let us photograph your garden — as it is, across the seasons, including the parts that are still a work in progress.
• Try materials and tell us the truth about them. If a mulch does not do what we say it does, we want that written down.
• Appear in the occasional short video or photo shoot, filmed at your place or at our Altona yard.

Who we're looking for

• You garden in Melbourne or regional Victoria, and you have done for a while
• You have a garden — any size, any style — that you would be comfortable having photographed
• You can explain things simply. Being able to talk to a nervous first-time gardener matters far more than knowing every botanical name
• You are willing to put your name and face to it
• You will say when something did not work

You do not need a following, a media profile, a horticulture qualification, or a large or expensive garden. A courtyard, a nature strip, a rented backyard or a balcony full of pots are all fair game. "Celebrity" is our joke about the role, not a requirement for the person.

What's involved, practically

• Roughly a day every couple of months, spread across the year
• Shoots at your place, or at our yard at Altona, whichever suits
• Materials for anything we ask you to trial, delivered free to your address
• An initial arrangement of twelve months, so both sides can see how it goes before committing further

What you get

Materials supplied for the work, credit and a link on everything you appear in, and the photographs we take of your garden to use however you like.

Beyond that — whether the role is paid, and on what terms — is something we will put in writing and agree with the person we choose before anything is published. We would rather have that conversation properly with one person than advertise a number we have not thought through.

How to apply

Send us the following through our Contact page, or call 1300 21 21 11 if you would rather start with a chat:

• Your name and your suburb
• Three or four photos of your garden, taken on your phone — unstaged is genuinely better
• A short paragraph on what you have been working on and what you are proudest of
• One thing in your garden that did not work, and what you learned from it
• Links to anything you already post, if you post — and it is completely fine if you do not
• Roughly when you are usually free

Put Garden Adviser in the subject so it reaches the right desk.

The fine print

• You must be 18 or over
• You need to be within, or able to travel to, our delivery area — check yours on the Delivery areas page
• Applications are open now. We will read them as they arrive and close the search once we have found the right person, so earlier is better
• We will reply to everyone who applies, even if it is a no
• Your photos and details are used only to assess your application. Nothing is published anywhere without your written say-so

If you have read this far and thought "that is basically me, but my garden is not finished" — no garden is. Send it anyway.

Questions first? Call 1300 21 21 11 or use the Contact page. In the meantime, the rest of Garden Advice is here, and the full range of soils, mulch, sand and stone is in the Catalog.