We (Sophie and Georgia) opened Karori Cottage Flowers in December 2023. Both of us are mad keen gardeners who are much better at growing roses than carrots.

We grow flowers sustainably in our home gardens.

Our Office

The Karori Cottage Flowers Team

We were both looking for something. That elusive something that follows that part of your life once your kids have grown up. Like so many women we put our careers on hold to raise our children. Sophie is a scientist and talented crafter. Georgia trained as a graphic designer, worked as a teacher and loves making art. Both of us love gardening and can’t live without our favourite flowers. We noticed that nobody made bunches of flowers the way we love them. Free, natural and wild. Or with the flowers we love. Roses, sweet peas and meadow flowers. We thought that other people might like the same sort of flower bunches as us. And so we came up with Karori Cottage Flowers.

Our Philosophy

This is what makes us happy

Growing Flowers

When you buy a bunch of our flowers you are buying a whole lot more. You are buying the lazy buzz of bees, sun-warmed petals and darting butterflies, blackbirds foraging for worms, the distant squawk of seagulls, the sound of the waves and the wind in the oak leaves, the sweetness of honeysuckle, the spice of old roses, forget-me-nots in shady corners, and bright bobbing dahlias like slow-moving fireworks.

When you buy a bunch of our flowers you are buying a small piece of our gardens.

how we grow our flowers

We grow most of our flowers from seeds, tubers, bulbs and corms. We take cuttings from short-lived perennials and collect seeds from our plants.
We enrich our soil with organic mulch and compost (we make our own), and dig as little as possible.
We only spray our plants with organically approved products.
This year Georgia is going to experiment with feeding her plants in containers with seaweed & comfrey tea (seaweed collected from the beach and homegrown comfrey). And spraying her roses and dahlias with a seaweed and garlic tonic.
Our gardens are heaven for bees, butterflies, birds and other small critters. We provide year round shelter, food (be that that pollen, nectar, berries or seeds) and water for all those beneficial animals (and the critters they like to eat).
Our gardens are proper cottage gardens, which are gardens of abundance (every spare space has something growing in it or up it). We use containers on hard landscaping. Our gardens have many layers of plants. They are rich in biodiversity.
We encourage our flowers to self-seed all over the place.
We are flower gardeners not flower farmers. We don’t grow our flowers in tunnel houses or plant them into plastic matting. We grow on a small scale and every flower counts.
Because of the way we garden and where we garden we’re able to grow a wide variety of cottage flowers. Some of the flowers we grow, like old fashioned roses, you won’t see in a regular florist’s bunch.
We grow the right flowers in the right places, which produces healthy plants.
We are in interested in regenerative gardening practices and plan to integrate more of these methods into our gardening over time.
Our flowers are locally grown for local people. Our flowers are fresh.