Rebecca Shelley’s online seed store specialises in rare varieties of cut flowers

Rebecca Shelley spent a lot of time in her vegetable garden during the 2020 height of the Covid pandemic.

As her desire for unusual varieties of edibles grew, the former veterinary nurse and mother of three noticed a gap in the market that seemed to be more than just a supply-chain issue.

“I found it hard to get seeds during Covid,” she explains. “Obviously there was a need for another distributor.”

In partnership with her husband and brother, Rebecca leapt to it and launched an online packet seed business from her dining table.

“We started selling just a few basic winter crop varieties in 2020,” she says. “Beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, beans and that was about it. We were also selling seedlings at a roadside stall.”

Soon a business called Veggie Garden Seeds was born. It was Rebecca’s baby, so she led the charge with a strong focus on sourcing seeds from around the country and internationally. Her photographer brother, Samuel Shelley, developed a website and shot plants. Rebecca’s husband Robert Knight, who works in nature tourism, took on the accounting and online marketing for the fledgling venture.

So far, so good. Then Rebecca introduced specialty flower seeds. And orders proliferated. Today, 90 per cent of sales of what is now called Veggie & Flower Garden Seeds are for flower seeds. And 90 per cent of Rebecca’s customers are women. Customer data — not to mention Instagram — shows a swathe of women from rural and regional areas, with plenty of room to create their own cut-flower beds. Some of them sell the pickings.

“There’s a huge cut-flower phenomenon of people growing their own blooms for floristry,” Rebecca says. “They especially they love rare varieties they are not going to find in supermarket flowers or stock standard catalogues. It’s something different to grow.”

“I know through social media that many women are making mini cut-flower gardens in their backyards, too,” she says. “Not everyone has a huge farm area.”

The first best-seller was a cosmos cultivar called ‘Cupcakes Blush’, for which she imported seeds from the US, and it remains one of the most sought-after flowers even as the range has dramatically expanded. “The flowers do look like cupcakes,” Rebecca says, laughing and showing me a picture on her phone.

We are sitting with her constant companion Murphy, a golden retriever, in the dog-friendly beer garden at the Salty Dog Hotel at Kingston Beach, just south of Hobart. Rebecca lives at nearby Blackmans Bay with Robert and their children. Henry is 10 and twins Isla and Louis are five. The little ones were six months old when Rebecca launched the business.

“I was packing orders when the twins were napping, then also at night and early in the morning before they woke,” she recalls.

After six months juggling family and business, she rented an office space at Margate, 10 kilometres away, to separate her home and work lives. Today, the business has expanded to four office spaces that accommodate 10 staff, mostly university students and mums with school-age children, who each work between two and five days a week. Now that the twins are at school full time, Rebecca works daily.

“Business is growing; it’s exciting,” she says. “We are very lucky to have such a good team working behind the scenes. Seeing the pile of orders going out by Australia Post at the end of the day, to all around Australia, is really cool.”

Cosmos has some competition on the bestseller list, with strawflowers, billy buttons, snapdragons and zinnias among customer favourites.

Each variety is carefully curated for its distinctive features, including ease of growing as well as appearance and scent. “Native strawflowers, which are also known as everlasting daisy and paper daisy, are super-hardy, last a long time in the garden and are great for the bees. The flowers come in a large range of colours — rose, white, apricot, peach, purple, copper and more — and once you pick them you can hang them upside down to dry them.”

Like strawflowers, fellow native billy buttons (Pycnosorus globosus), also known as drumsticks and sun balls, are easy to germinate and can tolerate harsh conditions and poor soil once established.

“They have long, stiff wiry stems, making them a perfect cut flower that can be used fresh or dried, when they retain their bright yellow colour,” Rebecca says. “They look great en masse in a vase, and in the garden they are just a really fun feature.”

Her number one choice of snapdragon this season is the ‘Potomac’ cultivar, with its beautiful tall stems for bouquets.

As for zinnias, the array is breathtaking. Recently, it became even more so with Rebecca’s freshly minted agreement that will see her become the only Australian stockist of US flower farmer Floret’s new varieties.

“People were saying it was like waiting for Taylor Swift tickets, waiting for the Floret stock to come live onto the website,” Rebecca says. “Quite a few sold out within an hour and we are waiting for our restock to fill the waitlist.”

Her move into seed harvesting with a focus on divinely scented sweet peas is also proving a success. “Last summer we harvested special varieties of sweet peas developed by Dr Keith Hammett, a New Zealand plant breeder, and they were a hit, a gift. They sold out in 24 hours. That experience, just from our backyard growing, has given us the confidence to grow larger crops to harvest seeds. We are currently looking for land to buy to so we can grow additional varieties of sweet peas then expand from there.”

Her biggest tip for her customers is to raise their seedlings in punnets. “You will get a better germination rate in a greenhouse-type environment for the first six weeks before transplanting to the garden. I haven’t had much success just scattering seeds. Birds dig them up, ants eat them and carry them off and water washes the tiny little ones away.”

Most of all, she is keen to share the feelings of joy and satisfaction of growing seeds into lustrous blooms. “It’s not as scary as people might think,” she says. “It’s actually easy growing from seed.”

Read more of Rebecca’s cut-flower growing tips here.

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