Australia is not one climate, and a planting calendar that treats it as one is wrong for most of the country most of the time. The Grow Zone Map at gardenbuddy.au/grow-zone-map/ sorts the whole country into seven growing zones on a single interactive map, and clicking through to your own postcode takes twenty seconds. Here is what it actually shows and how to use it.
A minute and a bit on how the Grow Zone Map works and how to find your zone.
What the Grow Zone Map actually shows
The map opens with all of Australia shaded into seven zones, each with its own colour and its own hatch pattern so the zones stay separable even if you are colour blind. The zone names are exactly as they appear on the page: Tropical, Subtropical, Warm Temperate, Cool Temperate, Cold / Highland, Arid / Semi-Arid, and Mediterranean.
Click a zone chip above the map, or click straight onto a coloured area, and that zone opens up to show every postcode boundary inside it. Hover a postcode and a tooltip names it and its zone. Click it and the browser goes straight to that zone’s growing guide, at /veggie-guide/<zone>/, no separate details popup in the way.
There is an accessible table underneath the map as well, listing every zone against how many postcodes it covers. As captured for this post, the counts read:
| Zone | Postcodes |
|---|---|
| Tropical | 108 |
| Subtropical | 333 |
| Warm Temperate | 555 |
| Cool Temperate | 729 |
| Cold / Highland | 108 |
| Arid / Semi-Arid | 81 |
| Mediterranean | 574 |
Cool Temperate carries the most postcodes of any zone, Arid / Semi-Arid the fewest. These figures come straight from the map’s own manifest, so they will move slightly as boundaries get refined, but they are the real numbers behind the map right now, not an estimate.
Why it matters
A tomato that goes in the ground in Brisbane in March goes in around September in Canberra, and barely stops at all in Darwin. Every planting recommendation on GardenBuddy.au, the Plant Now panel, the pest alerts, the Farmers Almanac, is written per zone, not as one national list. Knowing your zone is the one piece of information the site cannot work out on its own, and the map is the fastest way to find it without typing anything.
How to use it
- Browse by zone: click a chip to isolate one zone, see its postcode boundaries, and click any postcode to open its growing guide.
- Compare zones: click “All zones” to go back to the full country view and see how the seven zones sit next to each other.
- Prefer numbers to clicking a map: if you already know your postcode, the postcode and climate zone checker answers the same question by typing four digits instead, no map required.
- Make it stick to your account: the map and the standalone checker both tell you your zone, but neither changes your account. Set your postcode once in the “Where you garden” box on My Garden and every other tool on the site, the Plant Now panel, pest alerts, frost checks, reads from that same zone from then on.
Where the data comes from
The zone boundaries are built from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2011 Postal Area boundaries, matched to a zone lookup table and simplified for the browser (the full detail is 114 MB across 2,513 polygons, so it ships as one 0.19 MB file for the zone outlines and a small per-zone file loaded only when you open that zone). The basemap underneath, the towns and place names you see through the colour, comes from OpenStreetMap data, rendered and served from GardenBuddy.au’s own tile server rather than a third-party tile CDN, with OpenStreetMap credited on the map as required.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to type my postcode into the map? No. The map itself works entirely by clicking, zone chips first, then a postcode boundary inside that zone. If you would rather type four digits than click a map, use the postcode and climate zone checker instead.
Does clicking a postcode change anything on my account? No. Both the map and the standalone checker are look-up tools only. To have the rest of GardenBuddy.au use your zone automatically, save your postcode in the “Where you garden” box on My Garden.
Why do some zones have far more postcodes than others? Zone size on the map reflects land area and how postcodes are carved up in that part of the country, not population. Cool Temperate spans the largest and most subdivided stretch of postcodes, Arid / Semi-Arid the smallest number despite covering a huge, sparsely posted area of the interior.
Do I need an account to use the map? No. The map, the zone chips, the postcode boundaries and the growing guide links are all open to everyone, no login required.
Related features
The Grow Zone Map is the starting point for a few of GardenBuddy.au’s other zone-based tools.
- Your postcode and climate zone: the typed alternative to clicking the map, plus where to save your postcode so the rest of the site uses it.
- Climate zone growing guides: the seven per-zone growing guides the map’s postcode boundaries link straight through to.
- Farmers Almanac: a month by month version of the same zone-based planting logic, for planning further ahead than one visit to the map.
- Moon Calendar: once you know your zone, pair it with the lunar planting calendar to pick both the right crop and the right day.
Try it now
Head to the Grow Zone Map, click your state, then click your postcode, and you will land straight on the growing guide written for your zone. No account, no typing required, unless you would rather type than click.
