She’s South Australia’s best-known celebrity gardener, but much of what Sophie Thomson does goes on behind the scenes, offering on-the-ground help, advice and moral support for our country’s most vulnerable.

Words Genevieve Meegan | Photographs Andre Castellucci

On the day SALIFE visits the Adelaide Hills home of gardening guru Sophie Thomson, she has just finished a Zoom meeting about preserving natural grassland in South Australia.

“We have less than one per cent of natural grassland in this state,” Sophie explains as she makes tea and dishes out apple crumble slice, made with her home-grown apples. She moves and talks at high speed, powered by a burning passion to quite literally save the world, one garden at a time.

“I may be totally biased, but I genuinely believe that gardens and gardening hold the solution to the problems we face in our own lives and in the world around us,” she says.

“What drives me is to make a difference and help others connect, or reconnect, with gardening. Whether affected by fire, drought, floods, community disharmony, illness or whether it’s young people who have been living rough and simply never having had a stable home or garden, I want to connect them to the life-changing and nourishing power of gardening.”

Sophie, who rose to fame in the 2000s as a presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia is today one of the country’s most high-profile and respected gardening and environmental experts. She is an in-demand public speaker, author and media presenter and runs her own garden consultancy business.

But it is what this bubbly 56-year-old does away from the public spotlight that really tells the story about who she is and what she stands for.

Sophie works at the grassroots level – pun intended – to help people and communities who are at their most vulnerable, whether they be victims of natural disasters or homeless youth looking for help.

Using her skills, knowledge and connections, Sophie is happy to leverage her profile to help provide practical support on the ground.

“I’m particularly passionate about how important it is for people to get help following a natural disaster, whether fire, flood or drought,” she says. “I’m about to run my third series of workshops in the Mid Murray, which is about garden recovery after floods. So, I cover things such as how to get life back into the soil, how to start a patch from scratch, and how to start to grow food again.”

A diverse and wide-ranging career in the gardening business was always likely for Sophie, whose parents David and Coralie ran David Thomson’s Nursery in Summertown.

As a child, if she was ever in trouble, Sophie’s punishment was to weed a row of pot plants at the nursery.

“They were about 100 metres long, but they seemed like kilometres long to a child,” she says. “I would spend all day sitting in the drain behind the row playing with the mud and the slime because I hated weeding. Even today I hate weeding. It’s a punishment.”

The only child (her father had children from a previous marriage), Sophie wasn’t allowed to watch television except for a movie on a Saturday night, so she spent hours playing in the family’s enormous garden at their Summertown home. These days, if she is meditating and needs to visualise a peaceful place, Sophie pictures her childhood garden.

“We had these beautiful big deciduous trees, pin oaks, redwoods, tulip trees, beeches and many more and the light would filter through,” she says. “So, I close my eyes and I can see the garden itself, the beauty of the light.”

At age 13, Sophie began working in her parents’ florist shop in Blackwood and says any leftover or broken flowers were retrieved from the shop and Saturday afternoons were spent placing them around the house.

Even today, if she walks past a florist shop the beautiful smells take her back to those happy teenage days.

Sophie says she learnt the meaning of hard work by watching her parents, who worked seven days a week: “Plants need to be watered, even on Christmas Day”.

When they did manage to go on holidays, the family would visit nurseries – even overseas – and the talk around the dinner table was always about plants and gardening.

The young Sophie had no intention of going into the gardening business and, after finishing school, she moved to Melbourne to study naturopathy. But just before she graduated, Sophie’s father David passed away.

Sophie came back to Adelaide to help her mother run the nursery business, with the plan to stay only a few months. But Sophie found she loved plants and gardening, and enjoyed talking to customers, building on her plant knowledge along the way.

“You know what they say, what we try and run away from, we come back to,” she says.

A temporary stay turned into six years, as Sophie and her mother built the business up before selling it in 1997.

Sophie met her husband Richard Elston through the gardening world, his family had a flower business in the Adelaide Hills, and the couple lived in an old, converted chapel in Ashton.

Their brood grew quickly with their three boys and twin girls — today, the children are Toby, now 23, Rowan, 21, Beau, 19, and Violet and Rose, 17; the youngest three still at home.

With five children aged five and under, it was a busy life and the kids, just as Sophie had, enjoyed a childhood based around nature play and the outdoors – climbing trees, making cubby houses and helping their parents in the garden.

Around this time, Sophie began appearing on the radio as a gardening expert and also became a regular on the 1990s television show AM Adelaide. Eventually she was offered a newspaper column, which she still writes to this day.

While she never sought out a media career, Sophie’s vibrant personality and ease with people resonated with the garden-loving audience and her popularity and profile began to grow.

As she became more well-known, Sophie leveraged her celebrity status to promote the benefits of gardening, as well as to support the causes that resonated with her sense of social justice.

Her first book From the Ground Up – A Complete Guide for South Australian Gardeners was judged the best general gardening book in Australia at the 2009 biennial Laurel Awards for Horticultural Media of Australia; the first South Australian book to win this award.

In 2011, the family purchased Hamlyn Cottage in Mount Barker, a large property with an 1847 stone cottage. It was life there that sparked the idea for Sophie’s second book, Sophie’s Patch.

The book, released in early 2018, tracked the incredible transformation of the garden around the cottage from a “dry, windswept cow paddock” into a lush, productive garden that supplied her family with fruit, vegetables and eggs year-round. The property also showcased Richard’s metal art installations, as well as the family’s ethos of “reduce, reuse and recycle”; for example an old metal cot was repurposed as a pot plant holder, an old tram carriage became the chook house and shipping containers were transformed into a teenager’s retreat.

Always keen to attract the birds, bees and butterflies, Sophie even built a wildlife corridor, which resulted in the garden being named an Official Butterfly Site by the Butterfly Conservation Society of South Australia.

Sophie also opened the garden to the public twice a year, allowing the popular gardening guru to showcase her amazing knowledge and beautiful, edible and sustainable garden.

So, when the couple decided to sell Sophie’s Patch in 2022, there was a collective “but why?” from Sophie’s legion of fans and followers who had been living her transformation every step of the way.

There were even calls by locals to have the iconic property purchased by the state government or a community organisation and turn it into an education and tourist destination.

“It was always going to happen,” Sophie says of the sale. “We thought we were going to stay there for 10 years, and we ended up staying for 12 and a half. But we didn’t want to be there as the urban development grew. I didn’t want suburbia on my back door.”

Sophie has always been vocal about the lack of forethought and planning by developers, particularly in the way they create housing density with little thought to infrastructure and greening of the environment. “We should focus more on creating sustainable developments, which create happy, healthy and connected communities,” she says.

Not long after the sale of Sophie’s Patch, Sophie and Richard decided to separate, but they maintain an amicable relationship as they continue to parent their five children.

Sophie began househunting for another large acreage, keen to get started on another “Sophie’s Patch” from scratch, but she and her three youngest children ended up moving into a rental property in Crafers.

“I’m looking for something further out in the Hills, I want an old stone cottage, a renovator’s delight,” Sophie says. “I want a project that scares people, that’s what I’m good at and an old stone cottage, on a small acreage up to 30 acres, would be great.

“We couldn’t find anything like this, so we thought: ‘Let’s just shelve it while the kids finish school, let’s focus on them, and we can house hunt after that’.

“The kids love it here in the Hills, they feel as if they’re in the epicentre now compared to where we were, because they are near buses and shops.

“Ironically, I went to Crafers Primary School and they say that you always end up 10 kilometres from where you started. So, it’s sort of funny that my kids are now walking to the same monument where I also used to catch the bus.”

While she’s in the rental home, Sophie is keen to showcase what is possible in a rental property when it comes to planting an edible and productive garden.

She has hundreds of pots that she brought with her, and has planted a veggie garden that includes salad greens, bok choy, kale, silverbeet and spinach, tomatoes, zucchini, herbs and much more.

Sophie is also passionate about buying fruit and vegetables locally where possible, from a farmers’ market, and always advocates to buy what’s in season.

“The most important book I’ve possibly read in my life is called What Your Food Ate, by David R. Montgomery,” she says.

“I’d say the genre is gardening, horticulture, agriculture, nutrition and horror, because we have to have control of our foods and we have to know how our food is grown. What frightens me most is the lack of nutrient density in food. We have to think about modern breeding versus old-fashioned flavour. Flavour comes with ripeness and that flavour is actually the nutritional goodness, so if it doesn’t have any flavour then you’re not getting those nutrients.”

And then there’s Sophie’s community-based work, which has included helping fire-affected communities on Kangaroo Island in the wake of the devastating 2020 bushfires.

“After the 2020 fires I went over there and worked out how I could best help. I got a small grant and we set up the Parndana Community Garden in one week, just two days before the COVID lockdown.

“Also, part of the work I did on KI was with the president of the Kangaroo Island Garden Club, Anne Morrison. She started a monthly newsletter and she’d say, ‘Sophie is coming, what do we want or need?’. With something like pea straw I’d say, ‘Okay, let me hit up a generous supplier to see if they’ll donate some’. I took many van loads over there, with well over $100,000 worth of gardening plants or products donated from the nursery industry, to support the fire-affected communities of Kangaroo Island. This was in addition to supporting the fire-affected community of the Adelaide Hills.

“Currently, I’m working with the flood-affected communities here in SA, and also in Victorian towns including Shepparton, to get people back gardening again, because it helps them manage their stress at one of the worst times in their lives.”

Much of this disaster relief work is volunteer-based, with Sophie donating her time and expertise as often as is feasible.

It’s a heavy load to carry, particularly given Sophie’s busy schedule, but when communities turn to her for help, she knows the importance of not turning away.

“Lots of people come to me for help and I get asked to do lots of things and ultimately, you know, I’ve got a tribe of kids I’m supporting, and I can’t do everything,” Sophie says. “But when it comes to helping people and communities my usual thing is I ask myself; is it the right thing to do? Is it for a good cause? And if it is, and I can fit it in, I’ll do it.

“For example, I’ve recently been in Port Lincoln running composting workshops because they don’t have the green bin system like we do here in Adelaide. But it’s still really important, so I was over there getting the community excited about a FOGO (Food Organics Garden Organics) pilot that’s happening.

“When it comes to disaster relief, I reach out to my contacts in the nursery industry and ask them to donate goods such as punnets of flowers or veggies to give people something to grow which brings them joy, and they give me a whole lot more. I am passionate about community health and personal health, and I’ve done work in drought-affected communities across Eyre Peninsula. I run gardening workshops, and everyone comes together, whether it’s Kimba or Cowell or Cleve and I’m supporting people and connecting them to gardening, and to each other.”

Sophie is also currently working with Anglicare SA as part of its “Post Care Pathway” program, helping create green spaces around youth housing in the south-western suburbs, supporting young adults who are leaving state care.

“They reached out to me because these units sit on land that’s all bitumen, concrete and black pavers,” she says. “So, they said, ‘Can you come and help us sort out a garden, but we’ve got no money’. So, I went and had a look and it’s like a war zone. But you meet these young people who are great.

“With 60 per cent of youth leaving care in Australia ending up homeless, this program is designed to support young people as they leave care, with accommodation, scaffolded with support, training and employment pathways.

“I have designed the green space around this accommodation to make it cooler, greener, wilder and more liveable, and to grow food as well.

“So, these young people can now learn about growing their own food, getting their hands in the dirt and creating something together. It’s awesome.

“There’s actually a microbe in the soil that when you ingest it, it triggers the serotonin release in the brain, that’s your happy hormone.

“So, we are not just creating a garden, this is about physical health, mental health, optimal nutrition, food security, connection – it’s all related. The University of Adelaide is going to study the outcomes of this project, both environmental and for these young people. Maybe this could result in having green space mandated at all youth care facilities. These are the sorts of outcomes that remind me why I do what I do.”

Sophie has also just joined the board of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, the only professional gardener on the board, and another career highlight was recently winning the Inspiring South Australian Women’s Award 2024, which recognises outstanding women who have made a significant contribution to the community.

When reflecting on her career and all that she has achieved, Sophie says she feels blessed, but there is always more to do.

“As I get older, the more I realise that life is about making a difference and I reflect on the fact that hopefully I’ve made a difference and I’ve got more trees planted and more people into gardening and I’ve helped people get their hands back in the soil when they’ve been through traumas that I can’t even comprehend,” she says.

“All I know is that we have limited time and we’ve got to make a difference.”

This article first appeared in the May 2024 issue of SALIFE magazine.