ISLAND LIFE

Many of her customers have watched Lisa Kingston grow up behind her Salamanca Market flower stall.

She was 10 in the early 1980s when she first started helping her Dad, Bob Magnus, sell his flowers, plants and fruit trees.

These days Lisa sells posies only, starting from small bunches at $7.50.

What’s in the posies change every week depending on what’s in flower. “It’s never boring,” she says. There are more than 300 different types of blooms growing on her small rambling and rustic Woodbridge flower farm.

“It’s like a big, beautiful botanical garden of seasonal blooms,” Kingston says. “Everything is grown outside.”

She and her husband Steve, with a few hours of daily help from her dad, grow a lot of old fashioned flowers like the poppies pictured, dahlias, fragrant sweet peas and delicious-smelling roses that you can’t buy in the shops.

“Our customers love our posies because it takes them back to their childhood – they say, ‘I haven’t seen those since I was a kid,’ or ‘my grandma used to have these in her garden’.

“We like to keep things interesting so we have unusual varieties like daphne, scabiosa [also known as pincushion flowers], heirloom chrysanthemums, ranunculus and corn flowers.”

For foliage she uses fillers like parsley and rosemary flowers and crab apples and thornless berries.