For 18 months we’ve been searching for a home for Rooftop Roses – our flower farm for the future. A place not only growing beautiful, local flowers in a market inundated with toxic imports, but a flower farm enabling young women from refugee backgrounds to enter the Australian workforce for the first time.
For some reason, I always felt like we needed a partner to make it happen. An organisation who not only had the right place to grow our roses, but who was also really invested in our environmental and social mission – someone who could help us make this big.
Despite what feels at this point like hundreds of meetings with everyone from large corporate entities, local councils, universities and just about everything in between, we haven’t been able to find the right partner.
Something I’ve realised throughout this very long process, is the extent to which unconscious cynicism is stunting bold, creative ideas in this country. Put simply, it feels that most people are *very* scared to do new things, or in this case, support us to. They’ll hide under the guise of pragmatism, but in reality, I think it is fear.
In the search for space, we have faced an overwhelming culture of compliance, and an all-pervasive high cost, high risk attitude. It amazes me the number of people who have clearly been enamoured by Rooftop Roses, are almost overly keen to meet, will then sit there enthusiastically listening whilst I explain the big vision, only to then go quiet when I outline what we need to make it happen.
But whether this flower farm begins on a rooftop or at ground level is actually irrelevant. What really matters is that we know exactly what is needed to make floriculture more sustainable and socially impactful. And having a broader community that supports commercial creativity is vital if we are ever going to actually change things for the benefit of people who this system fails.
The first paddock I looked at out, Kyneton, Victoria.
I suppose that was a long-winded way of saying I’ve switched our strategy from properties to paddocks. I feel relieved not to have to endure any more meetings trying to convince big businesses sitting on hectares of empty land to let us lease a sliver of what they have. Instead, I’m hitting the dirt roads just outside of Melbourne to find us a place of our own.
On my quest looking for the perfect paddock, I have had time to reflect on what I am grateful for. And it’s really the people who *can* see what a brighter future looks like. Those who took a chance on us and actually funded the research for Rooftop Roses, to my team at The Beautiful Bunch for never doubting that I’d find this dream a home, and for the trainees in our program who pester me daily, asking when they’ll finally get to plant roses on our flower farm. They are my ultimate inspiration. In a world consumed by fear and governed by people with no imagination, it is a privilege to work in a place of such creativity and with young women who chose hope every time and encourage me to do the same.
J x
