Our Family

We are a family of seven

Whilst, our two oldest daughters have flown the coop, Matt & Carlie a.k.a. “Mr. and Mrs. Caldera” still share our 5-acre farm with our younger three daughters, horses, and chickens.

Matt & Carlie first met over 30 years ago but in one of those sliding door moments their lives took different directions. As far as love stories go though it is one with a happy ending as they reconnected after each finding it impossible to make other relationships work when their hearts were inextricably entangled from that original meeting. 

Whilst, we like to say that our youngest daughter Amelia was the best thing to come out of 2020, that year also saw the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Like many Australians, Covid-19 forced us to really re-evaluate our priorities in life and how we wanted to spend our time. We decided to trade our professional careers (Matt is a trained Chiropractor & Carlie both a Naturopath and Clinical Nurse Specialist) for the chance to work from the farm full-time. 

Carlie had the initial inspiration and vision to create Caldera Flower Farm, and is blessed to have had the full support and kind words of Mr Caldera behind her when she raised the idea. His words were, “Let’s just do it.  The very worst that can happen is we will end up with a beautiful farm and a home full of flowers.”

Matt has a background in health sciences and has really gone down the rabbit hole of trying to make sense of the current understanding of soil science, and how this impacts on the flowers we grow. Carlie meanwhile has spent countless hours researching plant profiles, especially as it relates to our sub-tropical climate and the unique micro-climates that exists on our farm. Over many years of trial, and our fair share of errors, we have developed a system for growing truly beautiful flowers that we are really proud of.

We have both always been heavily involved in growing our own food and flowers so it was a pretty natural progression to ramp up our production of beautiful cut flowers on a commercial basis. It has been, and continues to be, and enormous amount of work but we both love the physicality of the work, and the emotional rewards that can only come from creating something so beautiful to share with the world (or at least out little corner of it).

Our two oldest daughters,  Jasi and Bella, have both flown the coop now to explore the world and find their way within it! They still send photos of flowers on their travels and funny flower memes to keep us all laughing even when mother nature throws up her challenges.

Anise & Elke– our beautiful, vibrant twin daughters, spend their free time running laps of the farm, practising steeple jumps over the compost piles and garden beds, and collecting the edible flowers for local cafes and restaurants.  They can each design a stunning hand tied bouquet and build a no dig garden bed from scratch and have recently taken up a passion for growing dahlias from seed – so watch this space for their future dahlia collections.

Our littlest Caldera is Amelia – Amelia was born into a life of flowers. Spending her early days strapped to the back of us both as we expanded the flower farm! Fast forward to today, and at the age of three, she can now say the names of all the flowers we grow and those little fingers are so handy for helping to plant out our flower babies. Amelia mostly spends her time rounding up the chickens and singing from the top of the compost heaps.

I guess it is also appropriate here to acknowledge our extended flower family. We feel blessed to have had been supported so beautifully by all the other local flower farmers who have shared their knowledge, experience, and support so generously since we started on this crazy, joyous, challenging and exciting floral journey.