NSW Native Flower Farm
Take time to smell the roses - a saying so cliched it’s become more of a pun than the bite-sized wisdom that it actually is. Ask yourself… when was the last time you stopped take a second look, or let a moment linger even though you were running late?
Time is against us. The clocks starts ticking the moment we’re born. And we can either live by it or live in spite of it - take it back and let it linger. Flowers are a story of hope, a story of change. They bloom so beautifully, so briefly without holding anything back and when their time has ended, the seeds they’ve shared go on. Things have been busy for us recently and we decided it was time to stop and smell the roses, at least figuratively. So last week we hit the road and in just about an hour pulled into an Australian natives flower farm where we booked accommodation for two nights.
‘Silky Oaks’ is no ordinary flower farm. The over 30 acres of gardens were created by Peter Olde and his wife Margaret to share their passion for native flowers. Just last year Peter was awarded the medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his contribution to Australian native flowers. He is a world expert on grevilleas and the author of the book on the subject, the three volume Grevillea Book. The very grevillea he discovered that’s named after him is among the plants you can visit in the gardens.
This farm and gardens are one of the largest and most spectacular collections of native flowers in Australia. Staying there is like having a private botanic garden to yourself and the grounds are complete with rainforest and a fernery on-site. But the stars of the show are the native flowers, grown by different generations of the family encapsulating an extraordinary variety of banksias, grevilleas, proteas, flannel flowers, gum blossoms and so much more.
Our trip saw one sunny day and two rainy ones, but the gardens looked spectacular in both. For hours we wandered the gardens, weaving in and out of flowering natives, binoculars out, birds flying in and out of the flower beds along with insects including blue-banded bees and butterflies. David, Peter’s son who runs the gardens and accommodations now showed us a special banksia from WA, grafted on-site. He almost had to scrape our jaws up off the floor after showing us the extraordinary round banksias on the property which were only discovered in Australia in 2002, the Banksia rosserae published after his dad Peter and a small team located them in WA after a tip. The new species was named after Celia Rosser a national treasure and banksia botanical illustrator who painted every banksia species in existence.
We also gawked over a Woolly banksia, endemic to WA. The gardens an abundance of special treasures like this and every corner we turned we were in awe of the variety and in the Woolly banksias case its size (it was huge!). While we wandered, shy Bar-shouldered Doves avoided us while Crimson and Eastern Rosellas swooped in and out of the gardens dramatically interacting with Little Wattlebirds.
We were in heaven as an artist and designer who make products directly inspired by native plants, animals and habitats. And while there might be a comma in that last sentence, there’s hardly any separation of the three in real life at all. Plants, animals and habitats are interdependent and at the flower farm, we witnessed the symbiosis of native plants with insects, birds and other creatures. There was an abundance of life there and it was so inspirational for us.
Back in Sydney, we realized a funny thing happened when we took the time to stop and smell the roses - time itself seemed to stop. In the fields, among the towering flowers, time had no meaning, no power there, the only truth the present moment. This reminder was a breath of fresh air and one that we’ll be thinking about for a long time.
Scroll to see some more of our photos below :)
Cheers,
Stephanie + Amy
PS - If you’re interested in visiting the farm, you can book online here (we are not benefiting in any way from this recommendation or from our stay other than having had a great experience and the opportunity to see a private native flower garden and working farm).
