Buy from the Bush leads to new opportunities

Photo thanks to Luke Wong, ABC Central West

‘Buy from the Bush’ continues to provide our bush businesses with incredible opportunities and a generous amount of traffic sent straight to their doors. Canowindra locals, Chris and Nerida Cuddy were one lucky couple to be included in the platform last year.

Rewind to October of 2019, Chris was considering taking on night work in order to keep his nursery business afloat due to the impact of the drought on sales. A horticultural scientist, Chris had built the business from its beginnings in 2010, travelling to several plant festivals and field days each year, including the Collectors’ Plant Fair in Sydney.

Although word was building about his specialist nursery, the drought and accompanying water restrictions were taking their toll on customers’ ability to buy plants.

A year earlier, Chris had had to let two casual staff go and had been doing all the work of maintaining a large display garden, propagating and potting up plants, creating artwork and a website, and running the business himself.

Around this time, Grace Brennan of Walgett, NSW, came up with the brilliant idea of encouraging city friends to support her friends’ drought-impacted businesses - and ‘Buy From the Bush’ was born.

The idea took off, city folks were more than happy to have a simple, practical and highly effective way of helping drought-stricken rural areas.

It was then that one of Chris’ social media posts was publicised by Buy from the Bush, and the orders started to roll in.

That Christmas, thanks to Buy from the Bush, sales had increased on the previous year by 1400%, it was said the family enjoyed a celebratory Christmas ham!

The knock on effect was in full swing, Chris took on a trainee for 2020, and momentum continued to build, until the Covid lockdown inspired a gardening craze (along with a huge growth in online shopping) which took everything to a new level.

In June 2020, Chris and his family took a walk downtown and noticed the beauty and potential of a fairly run-down large building in Canowindra’s main street. After a lengthy process, the building was bought to enable a new adventure for the nursery and emporium. Then was born, ‘Perennialle Plants Emporium.

Chris has since employed two full time and up to six part time staff members.

When Chris and Nerida Cuddy bought the building mid last year, they began research on it; with the help of the Canowindra Historical Society, they unearthed beautiful old photos of the building’s various identities.

More photos kindly came from Ian Brown, who’s family owned the building for a number of years, he and his family have enjoyed passing on a little of that part of their history to the Cuddy’s, who actually have a very distant common ancestor with the Brown family of Canowindra.

The enlarged photos will be proudly displayed inside the new ‘Perennialle Plants Emporium.’ Nerida said, “We have always loved history and stories, we like to repurpose and/or restore old things rather than buying new things.”

“We felt that the opportunity to buy this beautiful building and breathe new life into it was a great gift to us, and hopefully will be a gift to Canowindra as well”.

Chris added, “We are very grateful for the support of our customers from all over eastern Australia, and sometimes further, as well as our own community of Canowindra”.

Chris and Nerida feel an enormous debt of gratitude to Grace and the Buy from the Bush team.

“We know we are one example of many business that were not only enabled to survive, but to thrive as the horrendous drought came to an end.”