A Mexican native puts down roots in Hāwea

Jenny shared her story with Jo Elwin

With ‘support local’ becoming the catch cry of 2020, Jenny Clark has timed her foray into dahlia growing perfectly.

“I’ve been a florist for 23 years and have always wanted to grow my own stuff.” Is Jenny’s answer to how she got into growing flowers, but I suggest it may also have a lot to do with her enviable Hāwea  property. “Yes, we are incredibly lucky to have this place, we were in the right place at the right time.” The 12.5-acre block, nestled in established trees near the Hāwea river crossing on Camphill road, has plenty of garden space. A house is part of the ten-year plan but home for now is an apartment at one end of a massive 500-square-metre shed built by Jenny’s partner Andy. “He’s a builder with an obsession with cars and this shed is all about that obsession,” she laughs. “I’ve got my bit, but it took some negotiating to get that bit big enough to accommodate a studio for client meetings, and a workroom where I can hold workshops down the track – I would like people to be able to come and pick flowers and make their own creations.”

They weren’t so lucky when a stack of tyres caught fire in the shed in 2019, not long after moving in. There is extensive smoke damage and rebuilding going on, but Jenny is very pragmatic about it. “It’s not a pleasant thing to go through, but we’re still here. We’re still alive.”

Jenny’s dahlia beds in summer bloom.

Back to the dahlia growing side of things, Jenny admits that she mostly got into it for profit. “What I pay at the market for a single dahlia bloom is horrendous because they’re not a flower that lasts well in transport and we are three hours away from the nearest flower market in Dunedin. The quality doesn’t compare to what I grow locally, I like that I can make them more affordable for florists, and that there is less of a carbon footprint – the grown and not flown concept is becoming very popular – people want to buy local and support local.

“There is also the joy of being able to put something into the ground, see it come up and flower and then picking it. I grew up on a farm in Tapanui and I was always in my mum’s garden picking flowers when I was growing up. I wasn’t so keen on the weeding back then, but I don’t mind it so much now. Not that we don’t have ways and means of getting out of having to do a lot of weeding - I have weed mat and mulch on all the dahlias, it wouldn’t work if I had to be out there weeding all the time.” Jenny has taught herself to grow, “with a bit of research online. Dahlias are easy to grow and they keep flowering – the more you cut them the more they flower – so they are a good value plant. I plant the tubers in October, around labour weekend – similar to what we do with veges because they don’t like frost - and they start flowering in December, usually just before Christmas, and go right through until we get the first frost in April/May when they die off. The first lot I planted in buckets, which I then divided and replanted into the ground this year. I planted 450 tubers this year and they will divide into about 2000 new plants for next season. They grow in a similar way to potatoes.

After learning the hard way, Jenny now labels all tubers for easy identification.

“I am planning to plant other things, such as sweet peas, ranunculus and anemones, but not in such large numbers because there is a bit more work involved. You’ve got to grow them from seed and plant them out. With dahlias you just pop the tubers in the ground and let them do their thing. I give them a bit of fertiliser once a week – a natural seaweed spray and a bit of blood and bone and that’s all I do.”

Of Central Otago’s beloved peony, Jenny says, “I do have a few out there but we have an amazing grower in Queensbury who does gorgeous peonies, so she has us well covered. A grower just up the road from here has planted tulips, which I did look at doing, but there is no point when someone else is growing them. We all have our wee niche. There is another grower in Queensbury doing a lot of perennials such as zinnias and Queen Anne’s lace, etc, so it’s good that we are all doing something different. The growers and florists in the area all work together to enable us to bypass the wholesale market where we can.

“Lockdown gave me time to put in 200 metres of new flowerbed which I will prep so that it’s all ready to go after winter when it warms up a bit. It also gave me time to design my website, which I launched just before Mother’s Day to bring in some income.” Jenny has created Studio 24 Botanicals, selling indoor plants, flowers and dahlia tubers, to complement the wedding-focused Studio 24. “Covid has seen me get back into retail - something I never thought I’d do – but weddings have completely slowed down now. I am still getting a few coming through but a lot of my bookings were overseas clients, so they’ve had to postpone. We were lucky Covid happened towards the end of the wedding season or the impact would have been massive.

“Mother’s Day was a saviour, the number of flowers sold was phenomenal. Many people hadn’t seen their mums for a while and couldn’t on the day, so they sent flowers. The flower supply wasn’t great because there were no imports and New Zealand growers couldn’t have their staff in to look after their crops, so production was low. It made flowers expensive and near-on impossible to find the following week.”

Flowers aside, there is a lot of planting happening around the property and I comment on how much they must have spent on trees. Jenny shakes her head, “We got a whole lot of cherry trees for free, from someone in Bannockburn who was ripping them out. My sister and brother-in-law were ripping out olives, hazelnuts and almonds from their property in Alex, so we got those for free, and we have been given a lot of apple trees too. We bought all the olives and feijoas that line the driveway and there are other things we are going to buy. There is an area I want to do in camelias, rhododendrons and smoke bush – stuff that I can use for bouquet foliage because it’s expensive to buy. We have a lot of big gum trees on the property, so I use a lot of that. I’m lucky there too.”

Andy is building her a charming potting shed using old windows from Mount Aspiring College, has done most of the garden’s infrastructure and is clearing land for tunnel houses. “He’s the only help I have and he’s very handy on the digger and tractor - a true Handy Andy,” she laughs. There is even talk of utilising his fibreglassing skills to make moulds for indoor plant pots – a project that Jenny and daughter Sam, who is studying art design, are working on to fill a gap in the market. She agrees that the shed has provided the family space to be together doing what they love. “When we lived in town Andy used to be off to his friend’s workshop all the time and I’d never see him. I like that I no longer have to meet clients in cafes – they can come here to the studio to talk through arrangements and that works well for me.”

I leave Jenny content in her workroom, under an arrangement of dried dahlias, (which she tells me she’s experimenting with because dried flowers have come back in a big way), labelling her tubers and tucking them into boxes of sawdust to prevent them drying out over winter. A selection of tubers will be available at studio24botanicals.com at the end of August with fresh blooms for Christmas – weather pending.