A GATHERING OF PETAL PUSHERS

I just lost my 309 day streak on Wordle. 

I didn’t drink my daily quota of water for three days.

I didn’t think about my family for 48 hours.

I just came home from the inaugural Grown Not Flown Flower Flower Industry Conference and I suspect I was in a room with others who were Wordle-free and thirsty with a hint selfishness just like me!

You know you’ve found your tribe when there are people in your company with fingernails that are more chipped, dirty and unkept as your own. This tribe has been dividing dahlia tubers, planting out summer annuals and stripping flower stems, so the mix of muddy pheromones are as attractive as a freshly dug truffle.

There was a Nutri-bullet blend of micro, small scale flower farmers, venerable florists, wannabe bloom growers, fresh floral graduates, rural dwellers, petal educators, soil nerds, earth lovers, tree huggers, oh, and a truffle dog. It was a nourishing botanical smoothie worthy of being served up to the Duchess of Sussex with flower sprinkles on top to “elevate it”. I bloody guzzled that smoothie!

Enough of the build-up, the lineup of speakers was quite simply, elite! 

Headliner was Erin Benzakein from Floret Flower, speaking to us from her infamous white flower studio in Washington State about her small beginnings and huge evolution to becoming a flower growing, seed-raising global goddess. She’s the Nagi Maehashi (Recipe Tin Eats) of the flower world and a seriously influential petal pusher.  Her flat lays of flower heads and images of truckloads of harvested dahlias have redefined the way flowers are photographed, her resources on flower growing extend from online courses, to books, videos and even an Emmy nominated four-part documentary.  Erin is the bomb, a flower bomb.

If Erin was about saturating the globe with flowers , Julie Cameron from Meredith Dairy was about dazzling us with her problem solving and innovation prowess.  

No power? Build your own power plant.

Got whey waste? Build a factory and produce new products.

No water? Build slatted floors that don’t need water blasting.

Too many male goats? Build your own abattoir. 

It feels like there’s no problem Julie can’t fix, perhaps the Carlton Football Club could use her skills! The growth and modernization of her business is nothing short of remarkable; I have a new appreciation for those addictive jars of marinated goats cheese and everything else she is now producing!

As a retail florist, my interest in attending the conference wasn't necessarily in listening to flower growing tech & science, but Alice Barry had me hooked at “automated frost detector”!  As a keen veggie gardener, my heartache at the first sneaky frost each year just might be a thing of the past and extending my autumn harvests into winter is so alluring. Roger MacRaild got us all excited about habitat restoration and the video of blowing up rabbit warrens as a method of pest control was his ultimate Tom Cruise moment, he did however, not look like Tom Cruise!  And just when I thought my brain had absorbed enough tech talk, out came Dr Mary Cole with her highly scientific, but simple prescriptions for improving soil health and biodiversity.  This legendary plant pathologist taught me more about the earth than I have learnt in 53 years; my veggie patch is about to get superjuiced - Bunnings had better restock tins of molasses! 

Health and safety was also on the floral menu and the key message here was prevention and education. Paul, Sarah and Grace all shared piles of resources, lots of them free, to help keep our flower growers and their communities healthy and safe. Flower growers are the primary source of materials for the flower industry and are the backbone of my own little business, I have felt first-hand how difficult life becomes when a grower is impacted by health issues or when accidents happen.  Some of the devices and apps available to support those in remote areas are life saving and life changing!

Now, I don’t want to play favourites, but Rita Feldmann took the stage and in my mind I was front row at a Kylie Minogue concert. Rita has evolved from a flower grower's daughter, to florist, to florist shop owner, to large scale event florist and channelled her distress at the environmental horrors of our industry, to become a sustainable flower trailblazer and educator. When Rita launched #nofloralfoam in 2017 off the back of an alarming study into the environmental impacts of florist foam, I wore out that hashtag like my Kylie CDs. Seeing Ellen Douglas alongside Rita describing all her sustainable mechanics and techniques was proof that thoughtful floristry is better floristry.  Knowing that a room full of petal pushers heard about the science and solutions had my heart going Padam, Padam!

Fair to say by the time I got to my slot as a guest speaker for the “Connecting with Your Customers” session, I was feeling a little like the B-Side track to a chart topping hit.   It didn't help that I was sharing the stage with lawyer/horticulturalist/author Mardi Rhoden and fine artist/studio florist/educator Viv Hollingsworth;  I knew I'd have to dig into the bowels of my 30 year career to keep the audience away from the lure of the coffee urn.  As it turns out, my messaging was in tune and the three of us were a great little floral choir with sweet verses about finding your preferred customers and a chorus advocating for staying true to who you want to be.  (Look, we aren't going to win an ARIA for our performance, but we'd definitely get a gig at the local RSL).

Our two day program ended with a dynamo storyteller and communications specialist Kimberley Furness.  Her presentation began with a disclaimer about her "potty mouth" and her adolescent fixation with writing "spicy stories", the perfect combination to get us through the last hour of an information-loaded weekend!  If Kimberley was a cast member in one of the Real Housewives shows, she would be my favourite 'wife', but given there is no Real Housewives of Rural Victoria, we'll just settle for her having given all of us the confidence to bang on about ourselves without apology and then post it professionally on socials.

There's only one guest speaker, another international treasure, I have not referenced but for whom I have found my key theme for the conference.  Georgie Newbery is a small-scale farmer in the UK who has set the world alight with her candid and honest approach to sustainable flower farming.  Her online Q&A from her Somerset verandah was refreshingly light and straightforward, her messaging centres around being goal driven and to "behave as if you are bigger than you are"! 

That concept of 'behaving big' has hung in the air for me like the scent of freshly picked daphne since the conference closed and will become Part II in the Gathering of Petal Pushers blog.

Stay tuned!