Photography: Hannah Puechmarin
Photographer Hannah Puechmarin exclusively shares this chapter from her first book, The Garden Room, with Home Beautiful. For more of Hannah’s beautiful work, click here.
Discarded foliage, bruised petals and insects decorate the cement floor where buckets filled with ice-cold water await the conditioned stems of blooms hand-picked from the cutting beds at sunrise. This colourful chaos is a common scene in the studio of a florist who has grown a creative life for herself from the ground up.
One cannot help but feel utterly inspired and right at home at Riverdale Farm, a 100-acre property that overlooks the Kalgan River in Western Australia. There is an indescribable feeling to the crisp and scented air that brings visitors back time after time. Here in her personal creative spaces – away from the main house – is where Helen Leighton wears her heart on her sleeve.
Meet the woman behind the flower farm
Helen has been slowly overtaking the large farm shed since beginning her floristry business over a decade ago. Her husband Jim eventually had to reclaim some space for himself. He built an additional wing, adjacent to the original, to house the farming supplies. Helen’s ‘side’ of the shed now accommodates the workshop space, floristry studio and cool room.
A Delbard French rose rambles upwards across the side of the shed, jostling for space with the door to Helen’s floristry studio. Although functioning predominantly as a workspace where flowers tend to overtake any spare surface as Helen prepares for events, the room is not without personality. Helen finds enjoyment and inspiration from her books and collected objects. She thoughtfully displays them on a timber dresser where she can see them while she works. Special ceramics bought from a maker in France are savoured here, next to brown paper Floret Flower Farm seed packets – simply too beautiful to dispose of – that are displayed in tiny flower frogs.
A floral photography practice
As Helen is a talented photographer and stylist, her studio is the perfect space to document her arrangements. A few years ago she published her first book ‘Garden Gathered’,
a record of life on the farm and floristry. Her book features mainly her own photographs, many captured in her studio.
Helen’s workshop is reminiscent of a French flea market, with collections of gardenalia spanning all walls and surfaces. Helen has a flair for items that tell a story, and she’s not afraid of a bit of chipped paint or some light rust. Pastel pink VJ panelling creates a partition between the workshop and the studio and sets the stage for Helen’s workshop displays. Sturdy timber shelving accommodates vessels of all sorts, patiently awaiting flourishes of blousy roses and fistfuls of wispy grass.
Inside the floral arranging workshops
Throughout the warmer months, her floral arranging workshops are popular. Surrounded by French-style folding chairs is the heavy handmade jarrah table where the magic of the lessons unfold. Some guests are regular visitors, enjoying a good excuse to spend the afternoon in a beautiful room, leaving with a posy of spring flowers.
Originally trained as a midwife who gave up work to bring up their two children, Helen has enjoyed two sabbaticals in the UK, first studying garden design in 2004. She returned to the UK almost a decade later, when she and her daughter attended some floristry courses. Though gardening had been a recurring thread throughout her life, her studies were a turning point, redirecting her to a life led by the seasons.
The gardens at Riverdale Farm have been designed by Helen and span several acres. Spread across the slope beneath the house is a border of perennial beds, followed by an enviablerose garden, productive vegetable garden, pinot noir vineyard, and chanticleer pear orchard. The structured design is surrounded by 60 acres of pasture for their herd of cattle and 40 acres of pristine native vegetation.
The ‘slow flower’ movement
Inspired by the ‘slow flower’ movement in the northern hemisphere, which was not yet prevalent in Australia, Helen began a native flower farm. After learning the hard way that it was both unreliable and expensive for flowers to be trucked down from Perth, Helen expanded her farm to include a variety of cut flowers – lovingly growing them all from seed. The cutting garden has grown to accommodate a mix of annuals, perennials and natives to use in her evocative floristry work.
Helen and Jim searched high and low for Riverdale Farm, chasing a slower pace of life. Though life at the farm has often been the opposite, they have happily chased the flurry of seasons in their garden for two decades. But at the beginning of 2025, their time at Riverdale came to a bittersweet end. Guided by a new season of life, Helen and Jim have moved to a smaller garden closer to town, where Helen will, in time, create a new garden and haven to feed her creative soul.
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‘The Garden Room: Outdoor Spaces Reimagined For Creative Living’ by Hannah Puechmarin
$55/hardcover, Booktopia
This is an edited extract from ‘The Garden Room: Outdoor Spaces Reimagined for Creative Living’ by Hannah Puechmarin. It is published by Thames & Hudson, RRP $59.99, and is out now where all good books are sold.
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