Lay of the Land

Olivia McCord loves zinnias — she calls them her powerhouses because of their limitless flowering. Hers grow in pops of lime, red and magenta, and they are all destined to become cake toppers: bringing to life elegant cakes and slices at some of Tauranga’s best-known eateries.

The zinnias are delivered personally to chefs in small boxes along with other flowers from
Olivia’s garden, such as rose petals, calendulas, carnations, dahlias — and her dried flowers are
sent nationwide.

Edible flowers have thousands of years of history in Roman and Asian cultures, loved for their
aroma, flavour, nutrition and aesthetics, and used in salads, sauces, drinks or baking. But in recent years they’ve enjoyed a global renaissance, helped by the movement to plant-based diets and
of course their Insta-ready ability to catch the eye. Crawford Road Flowers is our own little piece
of it all right here in the Bay of Plenty.‍

A brain for branding

Driving high in the hills above Tauranga, you’ll find a rural valley that Olivia and her young family
call home — rising up around them are green hills, orchards and lifestyle neighbours, and below
them is the shimmering sea of their own kiwifruit vines. Out the front, roses of all colours and forms. Out the back, stone terraces burgeon with self-seeded colour — vast belts of pansies, calendula, scabiosa, zinnia. Love-in-the-mist grows between gravel stones on the paths. While regular picking gardens often need to grow in structures for straight stems, Olivia’s flowers grow every which way
in wild abandon, because it’s only the flower head itself she’s interested in.

When I visit, the family is moving from the tiny white brick cottage to the brand new, pavilion-style family home built just metres away. It’s chaos. But stepping inside, where every detail in the new house has been researched and obsessed over by Olivia, you can see her interest in design shine through — dark inky feature walls and cabinetry are paired with a light and airy modern-country
feel elsewhere, from the botanical wallpaper in the bathroom to the soaring skylights.

This branding brain of Olivia’s was ignited in Auckland where she worked for serial beauty brand creator Tim Cunningham. “I watched that whole process — finding the product and creating the brand story around it.” She sharpened it further doing marketing and public relations for jewellery chain Pandora and fashion brand Repertoire. Olivia and a friend even launched their own raincoat range, Halcyon Day, that sought a stylish take on rainwear. They had it manufactured here in New Zealand but ultimately couldn’t compete with the more economical Chinese manufacturers.

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Experimenting with flowers

It was when she and her young family first moved onto their 2.8ha block in 2020, back then just a
flat paddock, that edible flowers entered the equation. Always keen on creating beautiful places to live (this is the sixth house she and husband Liam have built), she’d been looking into flower varieties for the garden but had no experience whatsoever with ornamental gardening. “So I always thought growing seeds was for experts,” says Olivia. “But — all the seeds grew when I planted them!”

She was also searching for ideas to create a business on the property; she wanted something that allowed her to work flexibly, with two young children under five.

“Lots of friends had asked about edible flowers, telling me they’re doing a cake for an event and
no one could find where to get them from. Also, sometimes people aren’t careful and put flowers
that definitely aren’t edible on their cakes.” Bingo. What made growing edible flowers more attractive was that if business was slow, then rather than being left with unsold manufactured stock, she’d simply be left with gorgeous gardens instead.

So it was out with Olivia’s ambitiously enormous terraced vege gardens, and in with the blooms
— Crawford Road Flowers was born. Her initial plan was to grow punnets of edibles and sell them
into specialty food stores (a bit like buying fresh herbs in the supermarket), but the perishability
of the plants made stores reluctant to stock them. 

Then out of the blue, local establishment Trinity Wharf messaged Olivia on her Crawford Road Flowers Instagram account with a request to supply its restaurant and bar with fresh edible flowers. They’d followed her social media and were keen to be involved. A new business model was born. Soon Clarke Road Kitchen, Spongedrop Cakery and Nourished Eatery had also signed on as clients, as well as online baker Sage & Grace.

The flowers are picked fresh with no stalk attached, packed gently into small cardboard boxes,
and delivered the same day to the Tauranga restaurants — where Olivia says they will last a week
in the fridge. (She also enables pick up outside her in-laws place in Bethlehem.)

Soon, inspired by ideas from other edible flower businesses around the world, Olivia was launching her dried petal jars. The contents can be sprinkled onto culinary creations for artistic flair and they became an instant bestseller. The jars are a perfect use for Olivia’s dahlias, which are much too
big for cake decorating, but when dehydrated and crushed along with zinnias they transform into
the ‘Jewelled Rocks’ petal jar.

Boxes of pressed flowers are another income stream for Crawford Road Flowers —  something that happened quite by accident. “Freshly picked pansies always just shrivel up, so I tried pressing them.
I had no idea pressed flower cakes were a trend!” says Olivia. “But these kits of mixed pressed
flowers are what I sell the most online — to cake makers who order a whole bunch of kits at once.” Her kits include a changeable mixture of edibles and purely decorative, such as nigella, pansy, eucalyptus, fern or rosemary.

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A bright future

Between supplying cafes and restaurants and selling online to the public, Crawford Road Flowers consistently sells out. Through social media word-of-mouth, with lots of fans tagging their friends in, Olivia says Instagram has been instrumental to business growth. For one thing, Louie was a newborn when she started the business, so she could not easily go around to physically pitch to businesses with her product. But it has amplified her public customer base too.

“Marketing through Instagram has been the singular most important factor in growing my business. That can be where the disconnect is, with us rural people who are really good at growing stuff but often not so good at bringing it to life on the marketing side,” says Olivia.

“The only limitation to growth now is me — I’m always sold out.” Her plan is to keep the business part time for the next few years, but ramp it up when the kids are older. For now she’s beginning to import seeds for edible flowers, as part of her product range. “These will be targeted at the home gardener who just wants something that looks pretty. I am very much an amateur gardener and these are all versions of flowers I’ve grown. If I can grow them, anyone can!”

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Forever home

Olivia and Liam have planted everything on this property: the kiwifruit, fruit orchard, flower gardens, the stretches of baby blue and silver dollar eucalyptus, a rose arbour. The pet deer Lottie wanders wherever she wants (the new rose shoots she “pruned” are now Olivia’s best producers).
This is their forever home.

Flexible flowers and all, Olivia’s now found a life balance she loves. “I couldn’t live in town again.
I love being able to go for a walk on my own land, I take the boys out and do a loop of the property
in the morning. If you live on the land, it becomes your identity; in town it’s just your house.”‍

crawfordroad.co.nz @crawfordroad_flowers

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Story by Skye Wishart
Photography by ilk

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