Family rose business in full bloom

By Felicity Connell, Shepherdess

Drive south-east from Whanganui on State Highway 3 during the summer months and you'll soon spot hundreds of roses blooming in a paddock along the roadside. A celebration of colour and fragrance, this garden is a gift to the community and to passersby - and a showcase for Matthews Roses.

Here, on land farmed by their family for five generations, the Matthews family now combines a commercial rose breeding and a growing business with sheep farming, cropping and agricultural contracting.

"I always say I married the rose grower, and he married the farmer," says Cath Matthews, 65, who met her husband, 74-year-old Bob, 46 years ago.

She'd just returned from Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington to the family farm in Whanganui, and Bob was working in his parents' rose nursery on leased land in Pūtiki.

"I was absolutely fascinated about the metamorphosis of rose-growing," Cath says. "It's like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly - you start off with this little wee bud, you put in the rose and it grows into a plant and flowers. It's magic!"

But Bob's parents were planning on closing their rose business. "So I approached mum and my aunts, Spin and Joan, and asked if we could lease some land on the family farm so we could take over the rose business," says Cath. "Thankfully, they said 'yes.'"

The present-day operation remains a family affair, with Cath and Bob's children, Samantha, 36, and Thomas, 31, forming part of the team.

"We've all got our lanes," Samantha explains. "Thomas manages cropping and agricultural contracting, and I'm involved with the roses with Mum and Dad. We all chip in with the sheep and general farm work."

According to Samantha, it's always full on, but the family having good communication and enjoying working together is what holds it all together.

"There is a lot of mutual respect and trust. We're pretty direct with each other. No one's beating around the bush, that's for sure. We've got a good balance. Mum and Dad have the experience, but when Thomas or I have an idea or suggest a new way of doing something, they're really open to exploring it."

Keen on inspiring new gardeners, one thing Samantha and Cath both want to dispel is the myth that roses require a lot of work.

"We want people to know that any Matthews rose they buy, they can trust that it's going to grow," Samantha says. "I don't want them to feel like a rose is like a scary thing. I want them to go, 'Wow! These are the most amazing, hardy plants, and because they're so hardy, they're so easy to grow.' I want people to just have a go, plonk it in and enjoy the results. You can plant a rose in a pot on your balcony and still feel connected to the seasons."

It's an approach that Cath agrees with.

"Roses are gutsier than people give them credit for. With just a little bit of seasonal TLC, you'll get so much back. It's so rewarding for us when people grow a rose that has significance for them, like Wish Come True, My Sweetheart or My Treasure."

At 98, Cath's mum, Lewanna McLean, continues to live independently on the farm where she was born.

Two of her younger sisters, Spin and Joan - also in their 90s - live independently on their farm next door. And she's happy to know the farm - which was bought by her grandfather, Nathaniel, and her great-uncle, Archibald Sutherland, in 1886 - is still being run by the family. When her father, Donald Sutherland, died relatively young, her mother, Ursula, carried on farming. Ursula's nickname was Big Boss, and it's easy to see why.

"She was born in Dunedin in 1892, and as a young woman she was one of the first to ride a horse astride, not side-saddle," says Lewanna. "Boys would throw stones at her, and call her 'straddle-legs.'"

Ursula was also one of only two women studying anatomy at Otago University at the time.

"Every morning, the male medical students would line up and shout, 'Clear the gangway for the sluts,'" says Lewanna. "The other girl didn't last long, and although Mum stuck it out longer, eventually she had to give it up. She headed up north, and before she married Dad, she had a Jersey stud in Tauranga. She kept breeding records that were quite advanced for the time."

Lewanna's father, Donald, was one of 13 siblings, and the only one to get married.

"We had a lot of old rellies that used to come and stay for ages, as there weren't rest homes in those days," Lewanna says.

"I don't know how my mum managed it. It was hard work for the women, but they just seemed to survive, and they always made sure they had starched tablecloths and napkins! We didn't get electricity until well into the 1930s. When we got power, the first thing she did was get a green Beatty washing machine, so she didn't have to boil on the copper anymore."

Five children, visiting relatives, a huge vegetable garden, along with cooking duties meant little downtime for Ursula.

"In those days, there weren't all the tractors and mechanical things on the farm. My father had a six-horse team, which meant more men working on the farm, and of course you had to feed them. They'd start off with early morning tea at half past five, cooked breakfast at 8am, then morning tea, midday dinner, afternoon tea and dinner at night."

The family didn't have a freezer, so they had to preserve everything they could from the garden, and Ursula did a lot of bottling fruit and making jam.

"And of course, when it came to community events, the women would do the catering," adds Lewanna. "Mum would make hundreds of scones and goodness knows how many sandwiches."

Ursula was well known in the community for her kindness.

"She was great fun as well as practical."

When Lewanna left the farm in her early 20s, she headed to Palmerston North to train as a nurse. It was there she met her husband, Sam, and they started a family. Her mother-in-law, she says, "was a determined woman too" - she'd worked in the Birmingham iron foundries, where Sam also worked from the age of 11, and she "forced a change to allow women to wear trousers in the factories" because they were getting injured and sometimes killed when their dresses got caught up in the machinery.

"I've got a photo of her with a lineup of women in the factory, and they're all wearing trousers because of her."

Sam, his three brothers and his mother emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand after his father died of injuries sustained in World War I. And, despite his lack of formal education, Sam went on to become a professional musician, playing cello in the National Orchestra - the precursor to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. But touring took him away from his family, so he quit and set up shop on Wellington's Mulgrave Street, making and repairing violins.

It was in the late 1970s that Lewanna and Sam finally returned to Whanganui and her family farm.

From her front porch, Lewanna gazes out at snow-covered Matua te Mana Mount Ruapēhu and reflects on how much Sam loved living here.

"Not long before he died, he said to me, 'I grew up surrounded by factory chimneys belching smoke. If anyone had told me I would end my days looking at a view like this, I wouldn't have believed them.'"

As the youngest of Lewanna and Sam's four children, Cath grew up in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington but returned every school holidays to help out on the family farm in Whanganui.

"Even though we lived in Wellington, it was the farm that we all loved," she says. "From my perspective, I had the best of both worlds. I had the city life and the farm life. But I always preferred farm life."

August school holidays would be lambing, she recalls. "We'd just get out there on our ponies in the rain and go around the sheep because that's what my aunties and Big Boss, my grandma, did. I learnt about hard work and just getting on with the job from them. You could also see they were passionate about what they were doing."

The lessons learned from observing her grandmother, mother and aunts' work ethic set her up well for her own future working the land and running a business. While she and Bob started off leasing, they eventually bought Lewanna's share of the farm and continued farming alongside the nursery.

"The roses dovetailed in with the farm because without the farm, we don't have the land to grow the roses. Sometimes we say we're a bit mad, because all year you're doing something - there's no real downtime. We're harvesting crops through autumn, then winter is the most intense time with the roses.

"When that's finished, you realise that in three weeks' time it'll be lambing!"

When the couple started off, they would both do the outside work during the day, and then Cath would do the paperwork at night. As they got bigger, they got more help so Bob could concentrate on breeding the roses. Cath, meanwhile, focused on marketing, logistics and distribution - and proved herself something of an innovator.

"We were the first rose growers to have a stand at the Ellerslie Flower Show," she says. "We were the first to do a printed catalogue in colour with images."

And although some of her ideas - like hanging rose baskets, miniature patio and easy-care roses - took a while to catch on, she says, "now they're garden-centre staples."

The innovation and hard work paid off.

"We built up from our first crop of around 1000 roses a year to a peak of around 350,000 annually. We've settled on around 50,000 roses these days," Cath says. And, as Samantha notes, combining the nursery with the farm is a unique but effective set - up.

"It works really well having lots of land to rotate our rose crop every season," she says.

"Regularly moving the roses onto fresh ground provides an extra little kick for the growing plants, making them strong and healthy. It's also good for the land that we work the roses in rotation with our barley, maize, wheat, oat crops. We can do things that other nurseries can't, like use straw from the grain crops as packing for our wholesale orders. Diversification is great, because if one aspect isn't performing one season, you've got the other strands as support."

As the commercial rose business grew, it brought both challenges and rewards.

"I'm nine years younger than Bob," Cath notes, "and early on we had some men who resented taking instructions from a young woman. I'd give them a task, and instead of doing it, they'd go to Bob and ask him what to do. He'd say, 'What did Cath say to do? It doesn't matter whether I ask you or Cath asked you, that's the job.'"

The family acknowledges it can be hard to find a work-life balance.

"I'm being completely honest - it's very, very hard," Samantha says. "There is no gap. We just go, go, go. We are all workaholics!"

But there's a reason behind it all. As Cath explains, "We don't do it because it's just a job.

"We do it because it's our life and our passion, and we enjoy it."

And, in an echo of her mother, Samantha notes, "I think it's only worth carrying things on if you have a passion for it, and then you find a way to make it work."

* This story appears in the Kōanga spring edition of Shepherdess magazine, out now. Find it in supermarkets, dairies, and specialty book and design stores across the motu, or order your copy online.