From Bob's Garden to Chelsea: Dawn Allen on Dish the Dirt

New on the podcast this week — a conversation I've been looking forward to sharing.

Dawn Allen runs Peninsula Wildflower from Bob's Garden, fifty acres at Boneo on the Mornington Peninsula with Bass Strait out the window. In May this year she took Australian banksias to the Chelsea Flower Show, and came home with a silver-gilt.

Her exhibit, Banksia Evolution, followed the banksia from seed pod to full bloom — every stem Australian-grown, sent across the world, and every one of the twenty-seven boxes opened in London without a single broken stem. International florists kept stopping at her display asking the same two questions: what are these, and where can I get them? The judges told her that if Florist of the Year could have been awarded on the flowers alone, gold was hers.

But Chelsea is only half the story. Dawn started as a Saturday girl in her local florist shop in the UK, met her husband at Covent Garden Flower Market, and found her way to the Peninsula — and to wildflowers, fifteen years ago, back when a King Protea sold for three dollars a stem and natives were considered daggy. She never looked back.

We talk about Bob's Garden and the gentleman it's named after, and Dawn's way of farming it: nothing gets ripped out on a schedule, whatever Bob planted lives out its life in the ground. We talk about why farm-grown, not flown, matters — the freshness, the chemicals you're not getting, the Victorian flower farms you're supporting when you buy local instead of a supermarket bunch that's already a week old. And we talk about her love of the perfectly imperfect stem: the kinked banksia, the seed pod half-eaten by black cockatoos, the ones no wholesaler would send you and no one else will ever have.

Dawn is quick to hand the credit around, and the growers behind Chelsea deserve every bit of it: Craig Scott at East Coast Wildflowers, Cassie and the Musson family at Wafex, Robert Luff and his paper daisies, Brimstone Waratahs, and Banksia Co. Growers in Victoria, growers in New South Wales — as Dawn puts it, this one felt bigger than any of them. It felt like Australia.

For anyone thinking about entering a show themselves — Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, or even Chelsea — this episode is your sign. Dawn walks through exactly how it works: the application, the brief, the drawings and mechanics, being told she was "number 11 out of 10" the first year, and the email that arrived just before Christmas telling her she was in. She turned sixty this year and decided she was going to do it. Hands up who's entering next. See you there.

Listen to the episode now, and head to our socials for photos of Banksia Evolution — it's worth seeing.

Find Dawn: Peninsula Wildflower, Bob's Garden, Boneo — @peninsulawildflowers_