The Farm Journal: A Year of Plants at Wildside

Starting this month, I'm going to use this space to properly introduce you to what's actually growing here at Wildside Flower Farm— one plant at a time, once a month.

Some of what I'll cover is already established and producing: our peonies, waratahs, hawthorn, roses, and lemon verbena.But over the next couple of years I'm also trialling a much longer list of herbal and medicinal plants — things like skullcap, meadowsweet, echinacea, valerian, elderberry, nettle, and around twenty others — to see what suits our soil, our climate, and where they might end up: wholesale to herbalists and tea makers, or eventually a tea line of our own. Some of these trials will work brilliantly. Some won't, and that's the nature of trialling anything on a working farm. I'll be honest about both as we go.

Each post will cover why I'm growing (or trying) a particular plant, what it needs from our climate, and a bit of the history and background behind it — because I think knowing where a plant comes from and what it's been used for changes how you see it in a bunch on your kitchen table.

First up, because they're the backbone of the farm right now: peonies.

Why We Grow Peonies -

A climate that works with us, not against us.

Mixed Peony Bunch - Wildside Flower Farm

Peonies have one non-negotiable requirement: real winter cold. The plant needs a sustained period of chilling below a certain temperature to properly set the following spring's buds — without it, you get sparse, weak flowering or none at all. It's a large part of why peonies are notoriously difficult to grow well in warmer parts of Australia, and exactly why they do so well for us here in the Southern Tablelands. Our frosty winters, which would be a liability for a lot of cut flower crops, are the very thing that makes a strong peony harvest possible. It's one of the rare instances where our climate is an advantage rather than an obstacle to manage around.

Plant once, harvest for a lifetime

Peonies are about as long-term an investment as a flower farmer can make. A peony crown, once established, can go on producing flowers for 50 years or more, with some well-documented plantings still flowering after close to a century. We planted ours as bare-root crowns, and they spent their first couple of years doing very little above ground while they built up root reserves — which tested my patience more than I'd like to admit. Now, at five years old, they're just hitting their stride.

I won't see the full lifespan of what's in the ground here, and I've made my peace with that. Growing a genuinely perennial crop means thinking past your own season, and honestly past yourself — you're planting something for whoever's farming this ground long after you've handed it on. There's a particular kind of patience that comes with that, very different to the annual cycle of sow-grow-harvest-repeat.

Red Charm Peony - Wildside Flower Farm

A flower with real history behind it

Peonies aren't just a modern cut-flower trend — they've been cultivated and valued for over two thousand years. The name comes from Greek mythology, from Paeon, physician to the gods, who was said to have used the plant to heal wounds. In ancient China, peonies were cultivated in imperial gardens and documented in early medical texts for their therapeutic properties long before they became the ornamental favourites they are today; the root in particular (what's known in Chinese medicine as white or red peony root) has a long history of use for pain relief, inflammation, and women's health, and continues to be studied for those properties. In Europe, peony roots and seeds were once believed to ward off illness and evil spirits altogether and were worked into folk remedies for conditions ranging from convulsions to headaches.

Given my own background in naturopathy, I find that history genuinely interesting to sit with — a flower that's spent most of its cultivated life valued as medicine before it was valued as decoration.

Peony harvest - Wildside Flower Farm

Why people love them

None of that history is why most people buy a peony, though. They buy them because they're extraordinary — full, ruffled, often fragrant blooms in a colour range from blush white through to deep, velvety red. They've become one of the most requested wedding flowers in the world, partly for the way they photograph and partly for what they've come to symbolise: peonies are widely associated with romance, prosperity, honour, and — fittingly, for a plant that can outlive the person who planted it — a long and enduring life together.

Combine that popularity with a short season — ours runs about six weeks — and you get a flower people genuinely look forward to each year rather than take for granted. I think that's part of the appeal too. You can't get peonies whenever you want them. You have to wait.

single peony wildside flower farm

Where we're at

Four years in, with 350 plants now maturing, this year is shaping up to be our best harvest yet — the first real test of a decision made long before a single stem was cut. We currently sell into one local farmers market for our six-week season, and I'm hoping to bring more florists on board this year depending on how the harvest holds up.

Next month, I'll take you through the waratahs — a completely different growing story, and a very Australian one.

Robyn

Wildside Flower Farm