Digger’s began when Clive Blazey realised that there must be other passionate gardeners out there who were hopelessly frustrated by the lack of interesting plants on offer at the local nurseries. As marketing manager for Hortico, Clive was convinced that Mail Order was the way to reach the keenest gardeners. Especially as many of the gardening enthusiasts were isolated in the countryside.
It was a very humble beginning. We started with a staff of two, Clive as the creator of ideas and catalogues and me as the courier to and from the Post Office. We had just moved to an old Convent Stable of two storeys in Albert Park. Downstairs was a combined livingroom and office area complete with bridle hooks still on the hitching posts.
The name ‘Diggers’ was dreamt up by our sister-in-law, Henny Hiscock, during a family brainstorming session to seek a suitable title for the new company. It was a clever name because it combined the grass roots concept of a gardener digging the soil with an icon of Australian culture — the independent, true blue Digger of the goldfields and the two World Wars. The Digger’s title also introduced a subversive element that seemed to undermine the more conventional methods of garden distribution. We were determined to bypass the retail dominance of the big stores by selling direct to gardeners.
We launched Digger’s with a colour advertisement in Your Garden and the first 34 page catalogue was tentatively posted out on the 1st of July, 1978. The garish cover boasted a clashing combination of red tomatoes and blue Tibetan poppies with the title ‘Digger’s Seeds’.
A total of 250 varieties of seeds were on offer, along with a membership to the Digger’s Club for $5.00 per year.
We waited with baited breath for the first orders to trickle in. After two weeks there were enough orders to employ two more staff who were also needed because I was just about to give birth to our third child Matilda (known as Noddy). Both staff were female friends of very independent mind — Jeany Sprague (now Bleakley) who runs a successful native nursery and Nancy Kimpton. a very creative design graduate from RMIT
Nancy and Clive were constantly sparring as she sharpened her wits on him each morning and invariably refused to do his bidding. However she relented on one of his birthdays when she made him a wonderful hedgehog cake, his favourite. It was shaped into a female torso with no arms or legs. just like the one on the cover of Germain Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ which was currently the rage. It was a work of art.
Some interesting workers later joined us from exotic places like Malaysia, Iran, and the Philippines and made our morning teas more tasty and lively as we hotly debated important issues of the day before, and the work ahead – a tradition that still continues at Digger’s.
Clive was obsessed with the popular TV program “The Good Life” at the time, and besides the ducks he insisted on purchasing two lambs to mow the lawn – a disaster of course, because they ate all the roses. Eventually they guzzled down some snail pellets left in the shed and promptly expired, poor things.
By the end of the first year we had moved on from just seeds in spring to bulbs in autumn, and roses and perennial plants in winter. The latter were the most difficult to despatch as, in those primitive times, the packers had to work in the icy corrugated iron shed, where their fingers froze washing the soil from the plant roots. These days there is no washing, as the plants are grown and sent in pots with shredded newspaper recycled to protect them in custom made boxes.
Women have always had the upper hand at Diggers, so when our first permanent male employees joined us they had to run the gauntlet of the savage humour emanating from the merciless females. One was a barefoot surfee called Dave Smurthwaite who only packed seeds when the surf was flat. The other was Matthew Alexander, who had a preference for organic vegetables. At lunchtime we were amazed to see the speed at which the ventilator above his desk moved after a coleslaw salad of his favourite cabbage appropriately named “Velocity”.
Several years after we started we were approached by the owner of the Australian Seed Company who wanted to go into partnership with Digger’s. This was a short lived marriage. In fact the affair ended on the first day when the badly braced seed racks collapsed under the combined weight of his numerous heavy glass jars, which contained many different varieties of carefully separated native seeds. Tony, from the Philippines, tried desperately to hold the seed racks together but they all slid sideways. As they crashed to the floor a look of horror spread over the face of our new partner, standing in Clive’s office and he savagely roared, “I knew I should never have gone into partnership with you!”
Our rare seed and plant interests always seemed to attract eccentrics like Dr. Gordon Castles, who was actually a customer, not an employee or a partner. He would appear unannounced on our Open Days, in an enormous stretch Mercedes, with all the back seats removed and numerous rubbish bins full of compost and strange banana trees. After depositing his treasures, he would stack the bins and proceed to set up the back of the wagon to sleep in. He generously contributed many rare bamboo, banana and water plants to our garden.
After five years Digger’s outgrew its half acre site in Albert Park, and we were desperate for a large garden to accommodate all our plants and dreams. Ducks and a pond had already been introduced to the Digger’s menagerie, so ‘Quacker’ and her feathered friends had to be moved along with the children, cats, household goods and all the Diggers’ infrastructure.
This included stock, office furniture and the inaugural Digger’s wooden spade – the company symbol, which still sits in Clive’s new office.
A revival of interest in cottage gardening helped establish Heronswood as the ideal home for Digger’s. Clive was dumbstruck when he first saw “Heronswood” in a north facing, sunny spot on the Mornington Peninsula. It was a neo Gothic stone house which was built in 1871, and set high on the hill at Arthurs Seat, overlooking a stunning view of Port Phillip Bay. The beautiful historic house was the perfect back drop for a cottage garden.
When we moved to Dromana in 1983, we lost all our staff except Nancy, so we had to gather together a new team. We employed Richard Vuat as our first Head Gardener, and he came with his wife, Jo, to live in the little cottage where the café now stands. Rick’s major contribution to Digger’s was converting half the staff (including Margot and me), to Transcendental Meditation.
More middle aged women joined the ranks: Heidi and Judy, later Margot, Sally, Deann, Lorraine. Kay and Lucille – all hard workers and good friends with wild senses of humour.
Then one night I returned home from a Probation Officers meeting to find several strange young men camped in the backyard including a fierce looking fellow with long dark dreadlocks and tattoos. In daylight he looked less frightening, and turned out to be Dave Pomare, who had come to help us as a perennial packer and soon became Head Gardener at Heronswood and later St Erth. Clive and Dave worked well together because they complemented each other – Clive had lots of ideas and designs in his head and Dave knew instinctively how to put colours together and how to place rocks and plants. Dave encouraged Clive to use hot tropical colours as well as the soft pastels that had prevailed in the previous borders. He lived in the back cottage that the Vuats had vacated and added lots of colour to our lives as well. He worked for us longer than anybody else, except Margot Roberts, who will notch up 20 years next April.
About this time we invited Peter Dombrovskis, the famous Tasmanian wilderness photographer, to Heronswood. Clive wanted him to photograph the garden, but he was not interested in the cultivated landscape as he loved the wild and natural way plants grew. He taught us to understand light and opened our eyes to the detail or minutiae of nature, like fallen leaves and flowers, and the extraordinary beauty of things we had never noticed before.
Our focus on drought tolerant plants caused a rapid explosion in our sales. By 1988 the staff members had quadrupled from 4 to 16 including several young women who worked in the despatch shed with great efficiency and speed. Amongst them were Lisa with her psychology degree, which now helps to make her a clever General Manager, and Terri who is currently our very able Customer Services Manager. I could no longer deliver parcels to the Post Office in the back of our station wagon. The Dromana PO had to send up a small van and eventually it was replaced by one of the large red post trucks.
Will Ashburner joined us in 1988 as our Nursery Manager, and his greatest contribution was to drag us kicking and screaming into the 21st century by introducing a modern computer program with the help of our resident expert Rod Teague.
We were determined to create an environmental and sustainable building by using locally cut reeds for the roof and rammed earth from the local quarry for the walls, so in 1996 the old tearoom was demolished to make way for the Harvest Café and new offices. The planning and objection process held this building up for over 5 years, and as no one had made a thatched roof for over 50 years in Australia we found a master thatcher in New Zealand. He was a German called Norbert Kleinschmidt_ and had an assistant Flipper, whose blond dreadlocks matched Dave’s perfectly. Their progress was watched with keen interest by the admiring ladies working in the shed, (including myself.
Wal Evans, (husband of Lorraine, our Despatch Manager), and our son Jol supervised the cutting of the reeds in the Tootgarook Swamp and their drying in the rammed earth building. Jol and a mate had erected the walls in the previous three months supervised by my cousin architect Alex Macnaughtan (who had also designed the new despatch shed apposite the Café). We were all fed up with taking turns to make the morning tea as the staff numbers grew, so it was a huge relief to all when the Café plus cooks appeared to service us as well as the Digger’s customers.
The revival of interest in heirloom vegetables complemented our fascination for preserving historic buildings and cottage plants. Clive travelled to America in 1990 to visit the Seed Savers Exchange run by Kent and Diane Whealy at a little town called Decorah in the back blocks of Iowa. Clive happened upon the farm manager, David Cavagnaro tending his seed rows in next to nothing – (in fact he stated that he preferred wearing nothing) – a tall brown figure with amazing powers of horticultural observation. He was also a brilliant photographer and pursues that profession today – see the cover of our latest Seed Catalogue.
In 1992 David came to Australia as the keynote speaker at our first Camp Out on the farm at Trawool near Seymour, where we were growing out rows of beautiful heritage vegetables, (including tomatoes, melons and silverbeet), for their seed. The farm at Trawool was leased by a terrific old farmer called Jim Bourke, who ran his sheep on most of it and the vegetable seed paddocks were managed by Dr Will Trueman, who had a PhD relating to native fish. Will ran a scientific three year trial for us where he compared the yield and performance of heritage against that of hybrid tomatoes.
Will and Jim created an amazing tomato seed separating machine by cleverly improvising with left over farmyard bits and pieces.
The first Camp Out was great fun. A tent city sprung up over night in the hazelnut paddock (as the Outdoor Ed pagoda had not yet been built) and the local CFA dispensed food and drink with typical country hospitality. Everybody felt very privileged to be part of such an amazing buzz of mutual co-operation and goodwill. These Camp Outs focused our interest on environmental causes. In particular in the preservation of bio-diversity. We made comprehensive links with the Organic Movement and Scott Kinnear, the GM debate and Bob Phelps of GeneEthics and with groups like Greenpeace and the ACF, (Australian Conservation Foundation). At later Camp Outs Jude Fanton, of the Australian Seed Savers Network in Byron Bay, came to give workshops on seed saving. Festivals at Heronswood have replaced the Camp Outs and we arranged subsequent visits for the founder of Seed Savers, Kent Whealey and Joy Larkcom, the undisputed ‘Salad Queen’, from the UK.
In 1995, we were approached by Tommy Garnett (an old headmaster of Clive’s), and his wife Penelope to buy the wonderful Garden of St Erth that they had created out of bush land in a valley near Blackwood. In the 1860s this valley had once been a mining town of 10,000 people call Simmons Reef, with a Wesleyan Chapel and a butchers shop, whose foundations still exist today in the paddocks around the garden.
There is also an irony in the name for us, as the little village of St Erth, after which the garden is named, and the village of St Blazey, after which Clive’s family is named, lie very close to one another in south Cornwell. The Garnetts had reached an age where the garden had become too much for them and they wanted their precious plant collections to be preserved professionally. Dave Pomare was ready for an independent move and loved the cooler climate of St Erth and the fact that it sometimes snowed in July. Three people who had worked for Tommy stayed on – Ken, Helen and Johann. Later Margot Roberts volunteered to live in Kookaburra Cottage and run the shop for several years. The last of the old staff have just retired from St Erth and all new staff are now installed, as well as Deann, from Heronswood, to run retail. Cathy has been manager there since Dave Pomare left to return to New Zealand.
A welcome new addition in 1998 was a café, designed with hot colours by our daughter Tess in the Garnett’s old living room.
Life goes on and renews at Heronswood – the garden is being reshaped by our new Head Gardener Simon Rickard, Clive and Andrew our Dry Garden specialist. Simon continued our tradition of employing eccentrics in the sense that his international success playing the baroque bassoon impressed us more than his obvious passion for gardening. He now lives in the old house at Heronswood, which is hopefully becoming an artists residence for musicians.
Meanwhile Clive and I have escaped from the stress of the workplace to an old weatherboard house at Sorrento which has absolutely no garden, just a beautiful natural landscape of indigenous Moonah trees.
The spirit of the Digger embodies teamwork and compassion as well as loyalty and resilience, and we feel that these great Australian qualities still exist amongst all those who come to work at Digger’s.
In conclusion, we would like to salute all the staff who have ever worked at Digger’s without whom it would never have existed.