New growth Story by Kate Le Gallez. Photography by Evan Bailey.
Not a lot of good tends to happen at 3am. But for Kristy Robertshaw, owner of plant and homewares shop Charlie & Jack, the early hours of a November morning in 2017 offered a moment of absolute and life-changing clarity. ‘In the middle of the night I was just like, “oh, I’d like to open a plant shop”,’ Kristy tells me, sitting at her kitchen table in her Victor Harbor home. She’d just been made redundant from her much-loved job as a student services officer, and while the idea of starting a business was nothing new – she’d been toying with the idea of an online business – the idea of a bricks-and-mortar plant shop felt like a predawn epiphany. Our conversation, thankfully, takes place at a much more respectable hour. The mid-morning autumn sun streams through the windows of Kristy’s living room sustaining what can only be described as a veritable jungle of plants. The long limbs of devil’s ivy stretch along ceiling beams, strings of pearls and rhipsalis drip from hanging pots, 24
palm fronds arc over the couch, while cacti and euphorbia stand sentinel behind. ‘We have a motto here, that it’s plants before people,’ laughs Kristy. ‘So, you fit the plants in and then the furniture.’ Kristy first began seriously collecting plants around nine years ago, when members of her family were dealing with serious illness and caring for plants offered small moments of solace. But her new hobby quickly progressed to obsession. Concerned she was annoying her friends by posting too many plant pictures to Facebook, she started a group called Crazy Indoor Plant People Australia, or C.I.P.P.A, roping in her son Jackson to meet Facebook’s two-person minimum for groups. At last count, C.I.P.P.A has over 146,000 members. The group offers a revealing insight into both the light and dark found in online groups. And while the latter means Kristy and five moderators spend over forty hours each week keeping the community ‘nice’, the former makes it worthwhile. Kristy recalls one chance meeting with a shop assistant, who, as the conversation turned to plants, mentioned C.I.P.P.A. ‘She got all teary and said ‘oh my gosh, I lost my dad and [C.I.P.P.A] helped me through – thank you,’ recalls Kristy, ‘That’s the amazing stuff.’
