Costa Georgiadis studied landscape architecture at UNSW and is recognisable by his trademark beard. Costa thanked his “Hellenic genes” as the reason for being so hirsute, and said he stopped shaving in 1991.

“I was in Egypt and got a little bit of stomach unrest, and the last thing I wanted to do was shave. It was November and we were heading up into Europe, so it was cold. So, I thought, ‘Oh, bugger it. I won’t shave.’

People ask him how much to shave his beard? They once offered $500 for him to shave for charity, and he refused. He said he is happy to shave for “$1m for every year that I’ve had it.”

Costa said that with “$34m, I can support some serious projects and do scholarships and invest the money to then run the profit back into these groups.”

Greek Australian gardening guru and winner of the 2019 Logie Award Winner for the Most Popular Lifestyle Show said on the ABC interview that the strangest thing has ever discovered in someone else’s garden was “a washing machine buried in the garden” full of empty VB tins.

“I’m sure someone said, ‘Oh, come on, we’re not taking it to the tip. Let’s just bury it.’ And they’re just doing it on a Saturday arvo and having a few beers, and then they’ve thrown all the beers into the washing machine.”

Costa’s favourite public garden is Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth which he calls “a biodiversity hotspot, and the flowers and plant species that are part of that landscape have evolved on some of the most depleted soils on the planet, yet they provide a showcase of flowering beauty.”

Costa called the botanic garden “a horticultural drug.”

“I gotta get my fix. Winter is when it’s going off, because those plants have developed an understanding of life that they don’t go and put out all this effort to make a flower in the middle of summer that’s going to get smashed by 35-degree heat, so they flower in autumn and winter and early spring. And some of the colours!”

The weirdest thing Costa has done for love is drag someone along a train platform because when he was leaving Paris and was having a final embrace. “I was so lost in that embrace that the train was moving. And when my friend started to pull away, I was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she said, ‘Costa, the train is moving. Like, let go of me.’

Moths are the most underappreciated insect Costa because they “live in the shadow of butterflies.”

“But the only difference is that one’s of the night and one’s of the day. We don’t see moths as much, so we don’t rate them – but if we got out there and saw their incredible patterns and their incredible engineering, they are as good as butterflies!”

One thing he has carried with him from his father is the idea of, “If it’s worth doing, do it properly”.

“If ever I go to cut a corner, he’s there on my shoulder going, ‘Excuse me!’ It’s something that frustrated me if I was doing stuff with him – he’d be so insistent and so particular – but he’s made me the same. I get it, because when”.

Looking back, he treasures his papou’s secateurs which is the oldest thing he owns.

“That’s one of the most special things that I’ve got: an instrument that he held in his hand.

“Every time I hold it, I feel like he’s [papou] holding my hand and they’re perfectly functional – I can put new blades on them.

“If you’re going to buy something, buy it properly. Pay four times as much for the best quality.

Costa said that his papou’s secateurs, would have been used in “the 50s and 60s – so they’re around 70 years old and they’re still perfectly OK.”

“We build stuff these days with an obsolescence because there’s this stupid business model that you want repeat purchases. Things like these secateurs really mean something to me, so if I give a gift, I want to give a good gift – or no gift at all.

The eagle is Costa’s favourite bird, he said on the ABC interview “because they’re so majestic and there’s incredible engineering in them.”

“Just to watch them glide, I go into a trance. They’re so precious because there’s so few of them – their habitat is under threat.”

“Birdwatching is something that I’ve gotten more and more into. The more you do it, the more you realise that it’s not just about looking, it’s about listening.

“You’ve got to learn the sounds and the songs, and then learn the plants and the lay of the land. And then you start to understand the geology.

“So then geology is cool! It’s not just for nerds.”