Jack Latti moved to Australia 20 years ago but he still gets homesick for South Africa, which is why he collects aloes. His garden is on a street called Gumtree Road in an outer Melbourne suburb brimming with eucalypts, but he likes to keep the sort of flowering succulents that grew all around his Johannesburg home.

Latti, whose garden, "Nioka'', is open this weekend, has aloes that are small ground covers, tangled shrubs and branched trees. He began acquiring them – from flea markets, the internet, nurseries and fellow enthusiasts – soon after arriving in Australia in 1998.

But it's not always the easiest collection to manage. It took him three years to dig up the plants after he and his wife moved house. The last lot to be transplanted were a group of the tree-like Aloe africana that Latti planted near the front gate. Elsewhere he has the small, stemless Aloe striata, the usually stemless A. cryptopoda, the spidery A. x spinosissima, the tall, single-stemmed A. ferox, the sprawling, multi-headed Aloe arborescens, the large A. marlothii ... the list goes on.

The garden includes all sorts of hybrids and cultivars, not to mention the plants that were once in the Aloe genus but are now in different ones, such as the quiver tree (Aloidendron dichotomum), the tree aloe (Aloidendron barberae) and the fan aloe (Kumara plicatilis).