He’s someone you don’t forget easily, thanks to the hair colour which Tarrant Baguley inherited from his red-headed mother. At 37, his own head-full is only now sporting its first grey hair, but some of you reading this will remember
Tazz when he first started out in this business, as a youth about to turn 21…

Back then he’d grown up working in the family business – a wholesale nursery in the Camden area, south-west of Sydney, with its catalogue full of camellias, azaleas, bougainvilleas and an assortment of other flowering
shrubs. “Then I saw an ad in the local paper which said they were looking for someone with a passion in horticulture and or agriculture. I went along and met Russ James.” For the next 13 years, Tarrant worked with Russ in his business TC Advantage. Russ taught him how to help clients define a project’s challenges and work out how best to buffer against these. By the time he left – “It was time for a change.” - he’d worked every sales territory in Australia. “I knew most of the climates, almost all the soil types. I’d been fostering the greater use of TerraCottem, being there with the necessary technical support, and through that, had watched plantings grow faster and survive in greater numbers. We’d helped protect landscapes against periods of drought and put managers in a position where they could cut back on water consumption without compromising their results. It was very rewarding.”

But there was another passion in his life beside greening spaces so for those who already knew about it, Tarrant’s change of career wasn’t that unexpected. “From my late teens I’ve been involved with competition off-road vehicles. On Christmas day we’d end up in the shed, taking a look at, and riding, whatever vehicles my brother and I had at the time.” So for the next four or so years Tazz threw himself into off-road motor sports, offering technical and sales advice around the componentry of various categories of race vehicles as well as continuing to compete. Tough trucks, rock crawlers, ultra 4 race vehicles were all part of the picture. “We were good at what we did: I’d say that half of the vehicles that we’d competed against had the capacity to win and yet in each year we finished in the top tier.”

What Tarrant learnt in that time away from the world of horticulture was that success is very often more about strategy than strength. So when he returned a year ago to run with the national position, he was the complete package. He’d worked on horticultural projects across Australia, he had a rock-solid hands-on grasp of what goes down when plants go into the ground, and he understood that by adding in some strategy, success was the most likely outcome. Now, being able to look back to see how those original plantings have thrived has been the most obvious confirmation that what he does makes a difference. Projects like: the Nepean River bank stabilisation at Penrith (NSW) which now looks like a long-term forest; the award-winning green spaces around the Beyond Today residential development in Hayborough (SA).

Wherever you are, and whatever the scope of your next project, if you’ve got TerraCottem in the specs sheet you’ve probably already caught up with Tazz. And if you’re new to your role or haven’t yet come across the TerraCottem soil conditioner/tech support combo, you soon will, either via Tazz or one of the other members of the team.

THE TERRACOTTEM ADVANTAGE

TC Advantage is a package deal. It’s about supplying TerraCottem (more about that in a minute), along with all the training, technical specification and compliance needed to turn a tricky project into a genuine long-term success. So when anyone has a turf, street tree, reveg-etation or whatever project to tackle, bringing in the TC Advantage expertise means you get: advice on which TerraCottem product to specify; training so that it’s ap-plied for maximum benefit; and monitoring to ensure compliance within the project’s specs. As for TerraCottem, it’s a brilliant soil conditioning treatment because it works on various fronts at the same time… To start with, it uses two main mechanisms to encourage substantial root development – polymers and root growth precursors. The polymers are a little like water-holding crystals except that TerraCottem’s hydroab-sorbent polymers have been carefully selected and well researched. This means that instead of just one polymer with a narrow water-holding and water-releasing ability, there is a group of them providing the same func-tion over a wide range, for years. To put it crudely, more water can be stored and released under a broader variety of conditions. (To put it pre-cisely for specification purposes: TerraCottem has an absorption capac-ity of a minimum of 4500 g H2O/100 g in distilled water using Method of Analysis CEN EN 13041, with a minimum of 90% of the water contained in the polymers being plant available.) As for the root growth precursors, by definition a precursor is a chemi-cal compound which leads to another. The precursors found in TerraCottem do exactly this, and for a very good reason. If you put growth hormones into soil, they rapidly biodegrade. But if you put precursors into the root zone, the plants get a kick-start by synthesising their own growth hor-mones. And this conducive environment – for optimum cell division and elongation – stays like this for 12 months.
Then there is a nicely varied collection of plant nutrients – soluble mineral fertilisers, in a format suited to the early growth phase of a plant; slow-release fertilisers, designed to offer a constant source of food over many months; and synthesised organic fertilisers which focus on the soil, stimulating microbiological activity and general soil health.
Add this all together and the result is fast and furious root establish-ment. This means greater accessibility to water, fewer losses, and, given the reciprocal dynamic between roots and canopy, noticeably vigorous growth. In the longer term, the soil conditioning power of TerraCottem means that plantings are buffered from stress. It’s great stuff.