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Sophie visits a working flower farm in the Adelaide Hills growing both natives and African proteas, and trialling Australian plants.
The Adelaide Hills are picturesque at the best of times, but when you find yourself at a local flower farm, the views are to die for! But this farm isn’t just for looks. This is a working flower farm, which means everything blooming and beautiful is destined to be picked and shipped.
Ange’s farm 29 acres planted for the business. She’s been growing flowers here with husband Des for the past 19 years. Before that they were a potato farmers in the Mallee. “We bought a potato farm in the Mallee at Parilla included 60 trial acres of Geraldton wax so I learnt about harvesting and exporting flowers. I learnt that we loved growing flowers and not potatoes, so we decided to move closer to Adelaide to farm flowers.”
The farm has about 100 species flowering plants. Two thirds of the space is currently African species (protea family) and the other third Australia species.
Many florists in Australia use the moniker ‘native’ in a very broad sense, including the long distant Proteaceae cousins from South Africa in the family. Their common ancestry goes back about 180 million years, so it’s a bit of stretch to call them natives! At the farm, many of the proteas peak in mid-winter, but the most spectacular of all, the King Protea, is flowering now. It makes a great central flower in a flower display or bunch. Also flowering are the pin cushions (leucospermums) and leucadendrons.
The backbone of the business was the African Proteaceae but Ange says that people are now crying out for the real things in native Australian species. Ange says that people are starting to go nuts over Eucalyptus foliage.
FEATURED PLANTS:
PINCUSHION Leucospermum ‘Veldfire’
WARATAH Telopea cv.
SILVER-LEAFED MOUNTAIN GUM Eucalyptus pulverulenta
VICTORIAN SILVER GUM Eucalyptus crenulata
TALLERACK Eucalyptus pleurocarpa
SWAMP PEPPERMINT Taxandria linearifolia syn. Agonis linearifolia
RICE FLOWER Ozothamnus diosmifolius
TEA TREE Leptospermum scoparium cv.
KANGAROO PAW Anigozanthos ‘Big Red’
Filmed on Peramangk Country | Balhannah, SA
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