Steven Orange

2024 | Horticulture

Hello, my name is Steve Orange, and I was awarded a Global Footprints Scholarship in Horticulture in 2024 and travelled in 2025.

I was in Europe for three months, with 10 weeks in Portugal, a few days in the Netherlands and nearly two weeks in Latvia.

The focus of the scholarship was to learn about sustainability and innovation in the horticulture industry, where historically many critical inputs have long been thought to be an unfortunate but necessary requirement for growing healthy plants and producing abundant crops. These are, however, prime areas for sustainable innovation and reducing wasteful or even toxic inputs.

My first placement was at a botanic garden called Orchard of Flavours in the Algarve region of Portugal. In Portuguese, Pomar dos Sabores is a botanic garden that solely grows fruiting, medicinal and otherwise edible plants.

Situated in a coastal Mediterranean climate, it faces similar environmental challenges to Perth and is researching cultivation techniques that improve water efficiency, salinity tolerance and integrated pest management through a combination of sustainable technology and organic inputs.

I completed a two-month internship here, designing and installing a trial comparing different soil preparations for establishing trees, helping to build a separate trial testing soil conditions for mango trees and assisting with planting a further 200-odd fruit trees, many of them rare or endangered.

Most of the established and non-trial plantings utilised various food forest techniques and technology, such as advanced drip-line irrigation, to optimise water and fertiliser delivery.

This example can easily be adapted to a wider range of contexts, even in part, to grow healthy crops and generally inform sustainable horticultural practices.

Before I left Portugal, I attended a two-week permaculture design course to earn my certificate. Nestled in a beautiful valley in Sintra with no reception, we were encouraged to take the opportunity to leave our screens behind and enjoy the fresh air. As such, only a handful of photos made it out.

This is the Terra Alta property where I took the course. It is undeniably a peaceful and productive patch of land. Regardless of one’s opinions of the ideological teachings of the school of permaculture, there are many practical and useful lessons that can be scaled up and used at an industry level.

It is a slow-moving philosophy that rejects environmentally costly agricultural inputs, such as salt-based fertilisers and heavy equipment, in favour of organic inputs such as compost, manure and good old hard work.

The trade-off is more manual labour and slower crop cycles, but maybe that’s something we can learn to appreciate in the modern world.

Besides that, developing an appreciation for the land you’re using is another key tenet of permaculture that should really be encouraged as more people seek land ownership and urban development continues to expand.

In a horticultural context, this means understanding the natural cycles and patterns where you’re cultivating, knowing how to grow in your climate and planning your operations around these factors.

Technological infrastructure can create artificial growing conditions that allow almost anything to be grown anywhere, but battling nature like this is expensive in many ways. Adapting to your context boosts efficiency, sustainability and the overall success of your operations.

I was unable to complete a work placement in the Netherlands due to a forecast promising thunderstorms and untenable outdoor working conditions, so I had to leave early.

However, leaving early is a pessimistic way to say that I was able to secure a replacement placement at the National Botanic Garden of Latvia in Salaspils, near Riga.

I spent 10 days working in the botanic garden, with some of that time spent at the Rhododendron Breeding and Experimental Nursery “Babīte”, as well as a day collecting wild specimens for a new bog conservation garden.

Growing plants here is a testament to adaptability and the value found in plant breeding programs. Long, cold winters with deep snow mean only the toughest can survive, and the breeding program has successfully created hybrids between tropical and alpine rhododendron species to develop specimens that can flower almost year-round and survive otherwise lethal winters.

Each place I worked had different lessons and very different cultivation conditions, but all of the learning followed a similar theme: adapting and optimising wherever possible can lead to huge boosts in sustainability, even if it involves lots of small, compounding differences.

There is still evidently room for technology to advance and offer even better solutions when combined with holistic approaches to horticultural operations, but it all relies on dedicated people continuing to do pioneering work.

A big thank you again to Global Footprints Scholarships for the opportunity to experience this firsthand and for the incredible support throughout my travels around the world.

Steven’s scholarship relates to these UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs):