If you’ve followed Farmgirl for any amount of time, you probably already know that eucalyptus is one of our very favorite greens to design with. Gunnii, silver dollar, bouquet baby blue, parvula, silver plate—you name it, we love so many of them. Starting Farmgirl in California absolutely spoiled us because eucalyptus was everywhere, and over the years it became such a huge part of the look and feel of our bouquets. So when we moved up to Washington and I started researching what we could grow here, I was a little heartbroken to learn that eucalyptus supposedly wasn’t going to be very happy. Too much water, wrong zone, too cold, too wet—basically the internet had a very long list of reasons why I should just move on and pick something else. Naturally, I did not move on.
A wholesale nursery we buy from up here happened to have two eucalyptus varieties in its catalog a couple of years ago, so I figured, what the heck, let’s test the no. I bought a dozen or so little quart-sized eucalyptus babes, put them in the ground at the Farmquarters, and hoped for the best. Two years later, those same plants are pushing 10 to 12 feet tall. They’re happy, they’re beautiful, and they’ve become one of my favorite things to point at whenever someone tells me something won’t grow here. I’m not saying research is wrong—I do actually believe in research (promise!), but I am saying that sometimes it’s worth putting a few plants in the ground and seeing what happens.
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Around the same time, we were trying to come up with a name for our new Farmquarters because, as you probably also know by now, apparently we cannot just have a building, field, hill, greenhouse, vehicle, or really anything at all without naming it. I went where I often go for inspiration and looked to the goddess Martha Stewart, whose Turkey Hill was named after the road it sat on—not, disappointingly, because there were turkeys wandering around on a hill. I loved the idea of naming our place after something that felt rooted in the land, but 110th Farm or Hill just didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
By then, though, we knew we wanted eucalyptus to be a big part of what we grew here, and Silver Drop Gunnii was one of the two varieties that had done so well in our original little experiment. We also happen to have a lot of rolling ground at the Farmquarters, including a hill that leads right up to our design barn. I could already picture that hill covered in eucalyptus someday, all that silvery-green foliage moving in the breeze as we walked into work each morning. So we landed on Gunnii Hill, and then, in true Farmgirl fashion, decided we should probably reverse engineer the place to actually live up to the name we’d already given it.
There was just one small problem. When I called the nursery this year to ask if I could reserve several hundred little Gunnii plants, they told me they had stopped growing them. Of course they had.
So I did what I tend to do when the easier option disappears: I made the project considerably harder for myself and decided to learn how to grow them from seed. I started Gunnii, silver dollar, silver plate, parvula, and bouquet baby blue in our greenhouse, and for a while I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. They germinated. They grew. I potted them up into larger sizes. I had hundreds of tiny eucalyptus plants and was starting to think maybe I had this whole propagation thing figured out. Then I did what I do - I went on a business trip.
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My trip happened to line up perfectly—or quite the opposite, actually—with an unexpected stretch of soaring temperatures. Within two short (but very hot!) days, I had managed to scorch almost the entire batch. Months of babying these tiny plants, and suddenly most of them looked like I’d put them in an oven and crisped them right up. I was devastated, but there also wasn’t much time to sit around being devastated because we still had a hill we had already named after a plant we now did not have enough of.
So I started over. I trained others to take care of them when I was out of town (light bulb stuff, huh?). And a grew another batch of 500 or so little eucalyptus babies. I potted them up, hardened them off, moved them in and out and in and out of the greenhouse approximately a million times, and then realized we were racing the clock to get them into the ground before the end of August. Which was exactly two months later than I was hoping, but that kind of seems like the Farmgirl way.
But maybe it was supposed to happen like this because the very week we had them ready to plant was the week of Camp Farmgirl.
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So we’re ready to plant and we have our team together at the Farmquarters? Well then, obviously, we should plant Gunnii Hill together, right? Our wonderful farm team hustled to get everything ready—the clearing, excavating, drip line, weed cloth, mulch, all of it—and then together we planted about 100 of those little eucalyptus babies on the hill leading right up to our design barn. The rest are going into the back couple of acres, where we’re creating a eucalyptus grove that I am also extremely excited about and will almost certainly keep adding to long after any reasonable person would consider it “done.”
There was something really meaningful about getting to plant our namesake hill with the whole team. Everyone dug holes, tucked in plants, added a little compost, and now we all have a little bit of ownership in what happens there. I have a feeling everyone is going to be slightly more invested in how “their” babies are doing when they walk past them every morning, which makes me love it even more.
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Right now, they’re still pretty tiny. You have to really imagine hard to see the hill I have in my head. But I can already picture what it’s going to look like when those plants are 10 or 12 feet tall like our original test batch, with all that eucalyptus blowing in the breeze in front of the design barn. Hopefully one day we’ll have far more eucalyptus than we actually need up here—which, will probably still not keep me from growing more.
And maybe someday we’ll even sell some of our little eucalyptus babies on the site so you can grow them at home too. If that’s something you’d be interested in, let us know. I’m always looking for a perfectly reasonable excuse to start another 500 plants in the greenhouse.
For now, though, Gunnii Hill is officially planted. And getting to plant it together, after all the testing, scorching, starting over, and learning as we went, made it feel even more special than I imagined it could.
xx,
Christina
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id: 2026-08-29-18:04:56:260t |
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