Everlasting Daisy Seeds

I found this article on the ABC Web site. Rain is needed to germinate these lovely plants or a sprinkler if allowed. Many areas in Australia are in drought and extra water for sprinkling is not available.

Everlastings lasting all year round.

Thursday, 24 August 2006

Presenter: Sian Gard

The Midwest and wheatbelt is famous around Australia for the wildflower season. Carpets of colourful flowers usually cover the ground from August to October, but not this year. The drought has considerably reduced the number of wildflowers.

What if you could have wildflowers in your very own garden, all year round?

Rob and Jen Warburton of Kojonup have turned the idea of growing wildflowers where you live into a growing business of selling everlasting seeds. Rob says the business came about, almost by accident ” We had a fellow collecting native seeds on our property on 200 hundred acres of bush we’ve got and just as a bi-product he sort of said, heres a kilo of seed why don’t you see if you can grow these things commercially, there’s a bit of a market for it”

Do these beautiful flowers need much care and attention when it comes to popping them in the garden? Not according to Rob ” we get the seeds and throw them on the ground, like you should do, like it happens in nature”

But with the size of the seeds and the amount of flowers that could spring up, you would think that making the everlasting seeds profitable and viable would be a labour intensive chore.

” Eventually the everlastings came up and we thought how are we going to harvest them? Says Rob ” I sort of then worked out a way for mechanically harvesting them, so by the time I had harvested them and put them through several process of cleaning them, we came out with quite a clean product. We were able to sell that and that was about five years ago”

There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of different types of flowers in the world to plant in your garden, but according to Rob what makes the everlasting or paper daises stand out is its uniqueness.

” There a long flowering annual, they come in lots of different colours. We grow the pink and white variety and also the pink variety, which is a very dark red sort of pink colour with a yellow centre, and some of them have a black centre, which is quite stunning as well. They grow through the winter months and flower mostly through the spring ” but as Rob explains these flowers can bring delight all year round “they can be grown all year, we have grown them in patches in November and they have flowered throughout the summer”

The pretty but very simple everlasting is not only a flower that is found in the Midwest and wheatbelt and admired by tourists, it’s a flower, which according to Rob is gaining popularity in the celebration of an everlasting union, marriage.

” We’ve had people who have picked the flowers and dried them, they’ve used them as table displays, in the bouquets themselves and we know a girl just locally who is very keen, who’s having a wedding in December, to come out and pick some flowers and dry them for table arrangements”