Catherine was working as a head propagator at another nursery and Colin had just left his job before moving to Windyridge.

Our intention was to set up a small propagation nursery operating primarily on solar power as this gets round some of the problems other nurseries experience in power outages.

We decided to specialize in mainly hybrid Grevilleas, some Callistemons and few other species. The plants would be propagated by cuttings and sold to the nursery industry in 50mm tubes.

Windyridge is located southwest of Gympie down some 16klms of dirt road, well off the beaten track.

We chose our property to run the nursery from because of its isolation, clean atmosphere and good water catchments and resources and also the quiet lifestyle we wanted.

After a year or two of Colin working on the infrastructure and Catherine bringing in extra money, we started to sell our plants to the nursery trade, the start of Windyridge Nursery.

From there we grew to the point where Catherine no longer needed to work at the other nursery and we became self sufficient
selling to other nurseries from Northern Queensland down to Victoria.

We were approached to supply plants in 3” pots for a local council for the free tree program. This was followed by enquiries from the public wanting to buy our plants but we had never had any intention of selling retail, if this had been the case we would have chosen a different property to operate from.

For the wholesale trade all though we are a long way out we only need to travel out once a week to meet transport to send the stock around Australia.

We became aware of a small market at Dagun Railway Station on a Saturday afternoon, located about 5klms from the Bruce highway.
After a visit to the station and a chat with the administrators it was decided we would sell our plants there,
and this was also a good location for local customers to pick up orders from the website.

Unfortunately we do not go to the Dagun Railway Station Market anymore.
However we do attend other markets now where plants can be purchased and orders collected, please contact us for details.

We found when people are buying plants an important thing is the information about the plant and we offer this in 3 ways.

We are there to offer friendly advice and guidance.

We have books on our stall which we have produced with photographs and descriptions, to aid customers with their choice.

And we have created this website which is similar to the books, showing our range of plants with photographs and descriptions.

We find these aids are very popular with our customers paticularly the website, people can go on line, browse our range, email a list and any question they may have and then collect the plants from us at the market, or we pack them into cartons and send them in the post.

Thanks for your interest in Windyridge Nursery.

Colin & Catherine Robinson