Gympie Growers: Petal Head Farm & Florist
Being a flower farmer and florist is a bit of a stretch from when Erin Dore worked in Sydney as an interior architect for over a decade, but it makes sense. She’s always been the outdoor type.
“After years of sitting behind a computer and uprooting my life in Sydney, I needed a big change for many reasons. It was always a dream in the back of my mind that I wanted to work with flowers, even if it felt delusional at the time,” she shares.
“When I moved home with no life plan, my parents had just purchased a fabulous property at Southside that happened to have a large flat green space that was never going to be used. At the time, there were no farmer florist businesses in Gympie and no cut flower farm in the Gympie central area, so I took the plunge to fill that market gap.”
Self-taught in every aspect of flower growing and floristry, Erin sometimes looks back on her first arrangements and bouquets with a nervous chuckle. “If you can even call them arrangements and bouquets… Thank you to the angels who actually bought these and are still customers to this day!”
Today, that unused green space at her parents’ has been filled with flowers, many being species that are challenging to grow here and require some manipulation to achieve.
“I do grow some basic flowers, but my ultimate goal is to grow unique flowers that people don’t often see or have a chance to bring into their homes,” says Erin, whether this be Delphiniums, Colibri Poppies, or curly Gerberas. “These Gerberas took me over a year to figure out how to get, with many late nights emailing the breeders in the Netherlands.”
At the end of the day, there’s the well-earned reward of eventually creating beautiful arrangements with these flowers, but Erin also loves that she knows where the flowers were grown, when they were harvested and the care that was taken in growing them.
“They haven’t been mass produced, harvested in a different country or state and transported here, which often decreases the vase life for the customer and sprayed in god knows what… My favourite moment in the overall process is harvesting. I think that’s the moment you know you’ve succeeded and you get to really have some fun out of the dirt and mud.”
