The making of a flower farm
Rebecca Starling has created beauty in gardens around the globe, from a whimsical English plot, to a fairy tale patch in the Swiss Alps. Now, the flower farmer and author has turned her hand to South Australian soil, transforming an old paddock into a rural floral oasis.
When Englishwoman Rebecca Starling landed in Australia in 2019, she’d been to this country once before and unfortunately one experience stood out from that visit – getting mugged in Kings Cross years earlier as a teenager. But here she was, ready to call Australia home – and about to transform a dusty former bull paddock into a new enterprise.
Rebecca was determined to turn a barren patch of land in Wangolina – a 20-minute drive from Robe in the state’s South East – into a field of flowers and had spent many years across multiple countries preparing for this very task. The flower farmer reflects on all she’s created here on a farm that’s been in her husband’s family for five generations.
When SALIFE talks with her, we’re sitting in the little shearing shed that used to see hundreds and hundreds of sheep entering and exiting through its doors. They’ve been replaced by hundreds of flowers – dried botanicals hanging from the ceiling and vases of fresh blooms on every available surface.
Rebecca in her gorgeous flower studio, where she creates beautiful bunches every day.
In terms of garden inspiration, it started early for Rebecca, who grew up in the English town of Rutland, one of the most botanically brilliant places you could find.
“You know that television show, Escape to the Country? The town where I grew up is just like that – a little village in amongst the rolling hills and it’s super green,” Rebecca says. “There are old cottages and houses, pretty churches and a pub for every 10 people,” she laughs.
Rutland is in the heart of England and it’s where Rebecca spent her childhood, went to school and helped out in the garden when she was asked to do so – although, at that point, she hadn’t yet discovered her love for growing things. That came later when Rebecca moved to Cambridge for her then-career in management strategy consulting. She lived in an idyllic thatched Cambridge cottage, set in a garden that, to this day, remains the favourite patch she’s tended.
“That cottage and garden was literally the stuff of dreams,” she recalls. “It was called Hollyhock Cottage and I had hollyhocks growing so high you could pick them from the upstairs window.”
The garden was filled with grand trees and rose borders. There was jasmine hanging over the fence and cascades of wisteria.
“There were climbing, hanging things and a big pear tree.”
That pear tree shaded the vegetable garden, however, and made it near impossible to grow anything – a lesson among many Rebecca was saving up for later in life. To this day, Rebecca remembers that thatched cottage garden so fondly, but she couldn’t stay there forever; she had to make a choice: the cottage or a blossoming romance.
“Hollyhock Cottage was so pretty and my heart broke when I had to sell it, but it became quite obvious that it was either the man or the cottage,” she says.
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The man in question was South Australian banker, James Starling, who came from a farming family in the South East. But he was living and working in finance in London when the two met in a pub on a sunny weekend in 2010; they married in 2012.
“This pub had low ceilings and it was dark, and James is six foot eight and broad as well,” she says. “He came walking in, blocked the light from the doorway and stole my position at the bar. I’m used to Brits being overly-polite and saying sorry for everything, so in hindsight, he was a little bit Australian.”
Even so, James convinced Rebecca to go on a date with him.
“We went for lunch and he talked to me about boxing kangaroos and opera and I remember thinking, ‘How on earth do those two things exist in one person?’. But if you’re living a city life as a banker and you go back to your family farm, those two things do exist. So, I sold the thatched cottage because this enormous human couldn’t get in; the ceiling was so low that he couldn’t stand up straight.”
The couple were married and moved to Hertfordshire – further from Cambridge, but a location that was commutable to both Cambridge and London. Shortly after, James found a new job and Rebecca had her first go at creating a garden abroad – in the icy environment of the Swiss Alps, no less.
“I was in one of those typical chalets on the side of the mountain,” she recalls. “It was terraced, so lawnmowing was hard, but there were lovely trees and the most amazing Swiss flower meadow – every year, it was full of flowers. The cows with their big cow bells would be around the garden at night.”
The key to growing anything in the Swiss Alps is raised garden beds, and understanding there’s quite a swing in temperature from day to night – sometimes 35 degrees during the day and around five degrees at night.
“We’d grow from seed and raise young plants indoors for several months to get a head start on the growing season because it’s super short compared with ours.”
When she wasn’t out in the garden, Rebecca was at work at the world’s second-most expensive school in the world, which sits between Gstaad and Verbier and is attended by children of minor royalty from around the globe.
“It’s a boarding school, and one night some teenage girls disappeared so we looked all around the very small town and we were beginning to stress,” she recalls. “We had to call the parents and a very grumpy Russian mother picks up and says, ‘Of course I know where Tatiana is – she’s in the helicopter’.
“Her father had sent a helicopter because she wanted to go into Gstaad with her friends.”
The next stop was Connecticut in the United States, where James took a job with a hedge fund.
Rebecca couldn’t get a working visa, so had time to undertake horticulture training, visiting the New York Botanical Garden every day. Her Connecticut garden was in a clearing in the woods, with a lake at the bottom and lots of lawn.
“There were formal borders around the house and shrubs – hydrangeas grew really well,” she says. “I had a greenhouse and that’s where I really learnt to grow things.”
Rebecca’s horticultural training came with the view to moving to Australia one day to live on the farm – that was always part of the deal. Before the couple was engaged, James said to Rebecca that if their relationship was to go any further, she had to know he would always be moving back to the farm.
“I’d studied with the Royal Horticultural Society in England then went for it with gusto in America to get some skills, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she says.
“I knew I wanted to set up my own business and do something horticultural, but didn’t know what. Then I started thinking about landscape design, but didn’t realise there were so few people living here in the South East – you can drive an hour from here and there aren’t even 5000 people, so whose gardens was I going to do?”
Inspiration struck on a road trip to see the blazing orange maple trees towards Vermont in autumn.
“There were all these little roadside stands with pumpkins and amazing produce, and they also had buckets and buckets of flowers,” she says. “We stopped and talked to one lady because we thought they wouldn’t be selling many and she said they sell three times as many flowers as pumpkins. That was when the penny dropped.”
And it has proven successful here on her farm, in fact, while Rebecca is chatting away in her refined English accent, a courier van kicks up a dusty plume along the driveway, about to pick up a bunch of flowers to be delivered to a lucky recipient.
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The move to Australia wasn’t entirely easy for Rebecca, who was devastated to say goodbye to her family. Growing up in that ideal English village, Rebecca’s mother worked in journalism and her father was in advertising. From her father, Rebecca learned to look carefully at details and from her fiercely feminist mother, she was instilled in the belief that she could do anything.
Rebecca’s sister is now an artist in Scotland – her home overlooks Balmoral Castle – and her brother is a nuclear physicist working in the south of France.
But from the moment Rebecca arrived at the farm for her Australian adventure, she was struck by the grand size of the ancient trees, the intense scent of eucalyptus and the expansive paddocks on the farm – rather than the neat little fields cordoned by hedging in the United Kingdom.
Rebecca out in the flower field checking the seed for harvest.
And, she loved it: “Especially the space, tranquillity and beauty of the landscape,” she says. “The bright light is so different from the dull English days where it can be grey for large parts of the year.”
Quickly, Rebecca put flower seeds in the ground, and after an impatient wait, sweet peas, wallflowers and some spring bulbs started to sprout and blossom, and so did Rebecca’s newfound career. The plan was to wholesale to florists, but within a month of moving to SA, Rebecca realised she’d have to change tack.
“I realised, I knew nobody and I was sitting here in a field on my own,” she says. “This was going to be quite a monkish existence if I didn’t do something.”
So she opened her own shop when a retail space came up in Robe, which allowed her to have much-needed face-to-face time, building a strong customer base. While she’s now closed the shop to spend more time at the farm, business comes in the form of online orders and weddings.
“I wake up and see my orders each morning and go to the flower farm and cut the flowers, make the bunches and leave them here with the door open and the courier comes and picks them up.”
Rebecca still remembers that very first order: “I went skipping across the field to tell my husband. I love it and I love it more every year. I think it’s a really nice way to spend your days.”
Rebecca says she’s loved meeting everyone in Wangolina and across the South East – all have been kind, supportive and positive.
“I have been amazed by how welcoming people have been,” she says. “I’m not a big socialite, so parties are not my thing, but I have made many friends here through flowers.”
When she does get a moment away from the farm, Rebecca experiments in the kitchen with the vegetables she’s grown – she’s become a competent pumpkin-grower. In this rather flat expanse of Wangolina, Rebecca misses hiking in the mountains, so when she’s able, she’s on a plane with her boots to explore a new place.
Rebecca has been passionate about passing on all the things she’s learnt on her global gardening adventure. The farm runs sheep and cattle and while it’s been a hard year with the drought conditions, Rebecca says: “Thank goodness for the drought-tolerant flowers”.
A mixture of dried and fresh flowers adorn Rebecca’s shearing shed-turned-flower studio.
She is focusing on varities that can survive with little water, such as seaholly, fennel and baby’s breath – and has found that her roses thrive in the heat. Lisianthus is a big favourite and Rebecca’s primary wedding flower. “They look like a rose, but don’t wilt as easily,” she says.
Adelaide Hills-based writer Christine McCabe walked into Rebecca’s Robe shop one wintry Sunday and the pair began chatting, resulting in Christine suggesting Rebecca come to the Hills to host workshops.
“Christine had set up a studio in her home and I was keen to expand my reach beyond Robe,” Rebecca says. “We thought people would simply love playing with pretty flowers, but they actually wanted information about varieties and how I had adapted having been taught in England and now cultivating in Australia.”
The workshops became more technical and Rebecca suggested to Christine they team up to write a book. Christine was already published with Thames & Hudson, so they approached the publishers with their gardening book idea and the response was a rather speedy yes.
The book, Secrets from the Flower Farm, which was released late last year, is filled with page after beautiful page of photographs of Rebecca’s Robe farm, alongside information about her processes and challenges, and how to adapt that to each reader’s own patch – wherever in the world that may be.
Rebecca’s biggest lesson? Try, and don’t be afraid of failing.
“Gardening is a process that you learn along the way; you kill far more things than you grow.”
This article first appeared in the May 2025 issue of SALIFE magazine.