Stepping out of a casual meeting with a friend at Boom Gallery café, Daisy Gubbins glanced across the road to a large vacant shed up for lease. The concept of becoming a florist was already floating around her mind after helping in a friend’s store, but its reality wasn’t realised until Daisy saw a potential location for her dreams. “I decided two days later [after seeing it] I wanted it,” Daisy says quite matter-of- fact. “It all happened really quick. I threw myself in the deep end a bit.”
Within a month her father and family helped create the space the shed is today. The empty tin box now seems like a never-ending vault of discovery with life and creation around each corner, some of which are paintings by Daisy’s own father. “He’s a plumber by day and a painter in the afternoon,” she smiles, affirmation creativity really does run the family. “He was tearing a house down so everything is recycled, the walls and the roof slats and the tables are from the old floors.”
The day I meet Daisy is after market day, and fresh blooms litter the counter we sit at. Much like her first coffee meeting – which resulted in her business decision of taking over the lease of the shed – our discussion is fuelled by coffee from the same café.
While it may seem like her story began on the river end of Pakington Street, the moment which sparked her desire to become a florist began at Red Poppy. “I was stripping out the back and [my friend] called me out the front to throw a bouquet together,” she says. “So I did and someone bought it and I thought, ‘This was the best’.”
At the time currently working as a vet nurse, Daisy left her career with the help of her florist grandmother and various classes and workshops to empower her creative choice. In these classes, what soon became apparent was Daisy’s love for the unusual. As she states, “I’m really wacky – I like the weird stuff”. She gestures to the bouquets on the counter which feature the sharp edges of the blue Sea Holly flower, with delicate pink blooms. “I love breaking the rules, it just looks like a mess but it’s meant to look like a mess. And I love putting things together that shouldn’t be together. I had to be on my own to do that, because nobody really embraced it but now they do.”
Already expanding to flower crowns and floral-topped cakes, Daisy hopes to one day build a mezzanine at the back of the shed and even open a café in the space – making it an area for complete connection and creativity. The ultimate goal: to make Rutland street a destination street where people can spend a whole day. Hopefully once the goal is achieved there will be many future Daisy’s inspired by the businesses around them.
Where: 16 Rutland St, Newtown
Site: www.asdaisydoes.com
Instagram: @asdaisydoes
Written by Amanda Sherring
