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Joe and Barbara Kurmann do everything at Whangateau Roses, from tending the 16,000 bushes to picking, packing and selling the blooms.
As Valentine’s Day approaches, flower sellers are gearing up for one of their busiest weeks of the year.
Last year in New Zealand, spending at florists increased by more than 150 per cent in the week leading up to February 14, with love struck – or duty-bound – romantics forking out more than $3 million on flowers alone.
And there’s little doubt that the bulk of that massive spend will have gone on the eternal flower of romance, the rose, some of which will have come from Joe and Barbara Kurmann’s Whangateau Roses.
The couple have been growing around 20 varieties of roses at their hilltop Coxhead Creek property since moving up from Auckland in search of a rural life 25 years ago.
“When we came up, there was a house and an existing 700 square metre shade house,” Barbara says. “We were trying to figure out what we could do so that we didn’t have to leave home to work. So we thought, ‘let’s grow flowers’.”
After completing a horticultural course and looking at all the options, export roses seemed to offer the best returns. Unfortunately, over the next five years, and after the Kurmanns had invested in 18,000 bushes, high tech equipment and 10 to 15 staff, the export market crumbled as other countries muscled in. It was a grim time, and almost spelled the end of the budding business.
“We were very new with little experience,” Joe says. “We had to downsize and lost all our staff. We even looked to sell the place.”
They soldiered on alone and, for local flower lovers, it’s a good job they did, because when the Matakana Village Farmers Market opened 11 years ago, they took one of the first stalls.
Since then, their beautiful blooms have been a hugely popular highlight of the weekly market, due not only to the quality of the roses, but to the incredibly reasonable prices – just $6 for a posy of 10 short-stemmed blooms or $12 for a long-stemmed bunch, wrapped simply, but stylishly in paper and tied with flax.
“If I can sell a lot because they’re perceived to be cheap, I’d rather do that, otherwise I just have to take them to auction,” Joe says, referring to Auckland’s FloraMax fresh flower market, where he sells wholesale three times a week.
There are up to 16,000 hybrid tea rosebushes thriving in the warm Coxhead Creek shade house these days, growing up to nearly two metres tall and in a wide spectrum of colours, from soft white to hot pink, and yellow and orange through to the Valentine’s classic of deep, dark red. They are picked at dawn and then kept cool in buckets in a cold store for a day or two before the market.
Together with Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day is not surprisingly one of the busiest times for the Kurmanns; they’ve been pruning their rows of red roses since Boxing Day in preparation.
