Our Team

In his late teens Gerry started dating Lisa (1989) and a number of years later Bradley their eldest child came along.

Marriage followed soon after cementing Gerry’s young family. During the first few years they all lived in a caravan with annex at the back of Gerry’s father’s house on their 17-acre property in Healesville. 

Gerry worked full-time on the rose farm where they were starting to raise their young family. Lisa (Gerry’s wife) recalls with perfect clarity the incredibly loud foghorn the old sawdust boiler used to make, waking all & sundry in the neighborhood, (usually at least twice a night, at some godforsaken time in the morning). Gerry would have to attend to it, in order to regulate the temperature in the large greenhouses where the roses grew.

Using his inventive nature from the beginning, Gerry setup and maintained some alternative heating methods to help the roses grow for the cut flower industry. He started with sawdust, then coal and ended up with using sump oil!

Although he didn’t like maintaining the heaters, it was a lot better than sorting, bunching and selling the roses himself.

In 1993 the family moved to Woori Yallock where Jordan was born and Tarryn followed close on his heels in 1994.

Gerry remained working at the rose farm throughout this time however, his thoughts were often not on roses alone… he was always thinking of ways to improve the business. He often struggled to convince his father of many of the proposed changes; as Coen had been brought up in Holland on a similar farm and leaned toward the conservative.