Costa Georgiadis robbed of Gold Logie: Meet the incredible man behind the beard

The ‘most popular presenter’ on Australian TV is half-man, half-hedge (his description not mine), Costa Georgiadis.

The bushy-haired presenter beat off competition from the likes of Carrie Bickmore, Amanda Keller, Grant Denyer and Waleed Aly to snag the gong - and even Tom Gleeson, who ended up beating him to the coveted Gold Logie, thought “the night belonged to Costa”.

If you haven’t heard of him, Costa’s the contagiously enthusiastic host of Gardening Australia, and has been since he stepped into Peter Cundall’s very big shoes eight years ago.

A landscape architect by trade, Costa spends every Friday night getting Australians excited about our natural world. He encourages us to love our beautiful native plants, to appreciate the ugliest of insects, and to rethink our own place in our neighbourhood ecosystem - all in just one hour of television.

Although he went home with one Logie under his beard, Costa really did deserve to take home the top prize. While Tom Gleeson made a mockery of Australian TV’s highest honour, Costa would’ve treasured it and given it back to the people.

All Australians should be outraged by the result, here’s why:

He cares about our country

Costa doesn’t just love sustainability, he lives it and breathes it.

On any given outing - and I wouldn’t be surprised if Logies night were included - you’ll likely find Costa carrying a beautiful set of wooden cutlery with him.

He tries to reduce his contact with single-use plastic in a number of ways, and bringing his own cutlery to the table is one of them. But he doesn’t do it to make others feel guilty about picking up a plastic fork.

Costa tells Yahoo Lifestyle that when he goes for gelato with his mates, he doesn’t pull out his wooden spoon and brag about it, he pulls out three wooden spoons, and asks his mates if they’d like to share.

“The last thing you want to do is to shame people and make them feel awkward,” he says, “You want other people to feel like, ‘aw that was easy,’” when they think about making sustainable swaps.

He says that the little steps people take, quickly become larger strides, and we should always be questioning the single use items in our lives - whether they be plastic forks, cling-wrapped veggies, or plastic supermarket bags.

“Just do one thing at a time until the habit becomes entrenched, and then that habit becomes your culture, then you become a billboard for that change,” he says.

He’s giving back, every day

Apart from his work on television, Costa is out there doing the hard yards in communities across Australia every day.

In his local community in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, he volunteers at his local school, gets involved with fundraising events and is a Saturday rugby referee.

But much of his schedule involves travelling across the country, where he works a whole range of people including regenerative farmers, amateur beekeepers and Indigenous communities (just to name a few), and then there are the conferences.

From a recent recent nursing conference where he talked about sustainability in hospital waste management and the healing power of gardening, to a biosecurity one where he discussed what you should do after a bike ride through the bush.

And of course, wherever he goes Costa makes a point of dropping in to visit the local community garden - something that’s not about to stop now.

In his acceptance speech, Costa vowed to take the Logie to the people.

“This Logie is going to travel the country,” he says, “It’s not going to collect dust, I want it sitting on compost bins, I want it in community gardens, I want it going everywhere, because this is for you, thank you for taking gardening into the future.”

He’s helping change the temperature outside your house

Okay, so this one sounds a little farfetched, but stay with me.

One of the passions Costa is continually sharing with the Gardening Australia audience - and the hundreds of everyday people he meets each week - is the life-changing impact of compost.

Composting is as simple as separating your veggie scraps (like carrot tops, potato peels and banana skins) from your general waste, which then “removes a huge amount of cost to the community in having to truck that waste away, dig a very expensive hole to put it in which will become a shocking legacy for our kids,” Costa tells us.

“But what you actually do [when you compost] is you start to grow soil, which is the very building block of life, and when you turn your scraps into compost which also feeds [the existing] soil, then your day to day actions are actually making the world a better place.”

What he means is that that very soil provides fertility to help our plants and flowers to grow, which in turn feed our insects and birds, which pollinate our food crops and feed us.

Compost also improves the water-holding capacity of soil “which keeps the thermostat of your local environment in a more user friendly range [because] it keeps trees growing which makes for solar passive air conditioning, and creates shade and places for people to sit and take in the beauty of nature”.

Glad you stayed with me? But it does even more than that.

The simple act of separating your veggie scraps into compost actually changes your whole relationship with the natural world.

“Composting is a chance to give back, and not just physically, but I think even spiritually, to give back to the world that nurtures us,” Costa says.

“The world is co-inhabited, we’re share house dwellers with the insects and the birds and all of the animals and all of the microbial life and all of the plants, and composting is actually your bond, it’s like putting a bond down for the future.”

“A composting mentally changes our narrative relationship with the planet because we are so bombarded from the moment we’re born with consumption - consume, take, remove and change - and this is a chance to give back. And once you start, it’ll actually change your outlook.”

When was the last time you heard Tom Gleeson say that?

He cares for our kids

Not only does Costa regularly donate his time to schools across the country, he is also the host of his own kids program on the ABC.

He started work as Costa the Garden Gnome back in 2014 and loves nothing more than encouraging the next generation to love the world around them, and in turn, to want to protect it.

One of his most treasured appearances is his performance of the song ‘Wiggly Woo’ on Play School.

“It’s a song about a worm, and worms are about building soil, and soil’s about growing plants,” he says.

His beard is iconic

Costa Georgiadis is synonymous with his big bushy beard. It’s been with him for almost three decades - and that’s as long as Gardening Australia has been running!

But contrary to what many may think, Costa was not born bearded, and you can thank a bout of illness while travelling in Egypt for its inception.

“I was crook and couldn’t be bothered shaving,” he says in a segment on himself that aired on Gardening Australia earlier this year, “I never shaved again.”

That’s despite numerous (almost incessant, even) calls for him to whip out the razor.

“The beard is me!” he insists, “I had the beard long before I got involved in television, and I’ll have it long after.”

It’s not a fad and it’s not a trend, he adds, and no, he isn’t hiding anything underneath. Here are the photos to prove it:

He’s a true Aussie underdog

When voting opened for the Logies exactly one week ago, the bookies had Costa placed last in the running to take out the Gold.

His fellow ABC nominee Tom Gleeson, was the runaway favourite, followed closely by the much-loved Amanda Keller and Waleed Aly. A bet on Costa to win meanwhile, was paying a whopping $34 at one point.

By the time the Gold Logie winner was announced, he’d shot up to the favourite - but it wasn’t to be.

While he may not have taken home the gold, even Tom confessed “the night belonged to Costa”. He’ll have to be contented with the Most Popular Presenter.

A true underdog. A true legend, well deserved, Costa.

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