PROFILE: LARKMAN NURSERIES
The formidable team behind Larkman Nurseries By Matt Ross In December 2020, NGIV CEO Craig Taberner and myself headed for Lilydale to visit Larkman Nurseries, catch up with the owners Clive and Di and take in the recent developments they’ve undertaken. Larkman Nurseries sits perched on a hill in Lilydale enjoying vast and glorious views across the Yarra Valley. Not only is it home to a major tubestock nursery, it’s also the home of Clive and Di Larkman. Both passionate growers, bursting with ideas and energy, I suspect living on site suits them down to the ground. Clive found himself in the world of plants and botany by chance. As a Year 12 student he had picked seven of eight subjects for the following year of schooling. Pushed for one more, he chose biology, fell in love with it and never looked back. Di Campaign was a farmer’s daughter, who had an appreciation of plants, nature and growing, as far back as she can remember. Di left the farm to live in Sydney where she attended Hales Business College. She worked for a range companies before spending seven years working for Estee Lauder. Di then moved to Adelaide with her first husband and three young boys.
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GROUNDSWELL FEBRUARY 2021
The two met and married in 1990 and Di moved from Adelaide, where she was working for Lasscocks Nursery in Adelaide, to Lilydale. And together they make a formidable team; Clive, a qualified botanist with an understanding of how plants grow and business management and Di, with her appreciation of how to grow plants and office management. The nursery itself is a hum of activity. Other growers come and go after depositing plants at the onsite commercial quarantine facility. Son and sales manager, Simon, zips around the place doing deals as he goes. And a small army of horticulturists tend to the real stars, the plants. And they certainly have their work cut out for them, Clive believes you can never have too many varieties, in any given year the nursery grows somewhere around 6,000 species.
