🌸 From the Archives: Petrina Blooms — 8,000 Bulbs in a Suburban Garden
About this episode
Petrina shares her journey of transforming a suburban garden into a floral haven while navigating personal challenges and the impact of lockdown.
Some episodes are time capsules. This is one of them. We're rewinding to late 2020, as Victoria emerged from its first long lockdown — gin raised, friends finally allowed over, the whole state breathing out. In the middle of it sits Petrina from Petrina Blooms: a lifelong flower obsessive who turned a suburban Ivanhoe block into a garden of 8,000+ bulbs and 120 roses, and who had just started selling bouquets completely by accident. Petrina has loved flowers since she grew a single perfumed carnation from seed in prep and wrote in her grade-six diary that she wanted to be a florist. She kept that love deliberately un-commercial for decades, working weekends as a florist's "bucket girl" because she never wanted to "curse a flower" by making it her job. Her path wound through years working with people experiencing homelessness, then to the skies as an Emirates flight attendant — earning the nickname "Flower Girl" for smuggling peonies, lilacs and frangipani home in the first-class fridge. After marrying a passenger and trading Dubai's seasonless heat for Melbourne's four seasons, she came home, felt utterly lost, and ordered four thousand ranunculus for a tiny terrace garden. From…
More episodes of Dish the Dirt
- Taming the Beast: How Hemp and Mycelium Could Replace Floral Foam
- From Bob's Garden to Chelsea — Dawn Allen, Peninsula Wildflower
- The one and only Petrina Blooms
- The Cotton Bunch with Jamie Rother & Caroline Azria
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