Our story — Meet SCOTT
I grew up in Orange, in central-west NSW, where my grandfather had a quarter-acre kitchen garden behind his house on Kite Street. He grew everything, silverbeet, tomatoes, dahlias along the fence line, and he kept his tools in a rusted tin shed that smelled like linseed oil and dry dirt. I never thought that would mean anything to me professionally. I studied civil engineering at Newcastle, worked for a surveying firm out of Bathurst for six years, and spent most of my weekends indoors. The garden skipped a generation in our family. Then I met Renee at a seed-saving workshop run out of the Mudgee Showground in the spring of 2017, and things started to shift.
Renee had been running the wholesale side of a small nursery outside Bowral for four years. She knew supply chains, she knew growers, and she knew exactly which Australian native seed mixes actually germinated reliably and which ones were mostly marketing. I had project management, logistics, and enough spreadsheet hours to wallpaper a house. Neither of us had a retail background. We moved to Dwellingup in late 2019 because the rent was real and the jarrah forest was right there, and we both needed to stop commuting. We kept our day work for another eighteen months while we figured out whether there was actually a business here or just a hobby with ambitions.
The decision moment was a Tuesday in March 2021. Renee had been tracking our test orders through a small Etsy store, maybe 340 units over eight months, and she put a single page of numbers in front of me at the kitchen table. The margin was there. The repeat rate was 34 percent. We had three wholesale enquiries sitting unanswered because we had no proper entity to invoice through. I rang our accountant in Northam the next morning, and by April we had Sable Hollow registered and a first proper order placed with our high-carbon steel supplier in regional Victoria. We closed both our old jobs by June.
Right now we run everything from a converted shed behind the house in Dwellingup, about 14 kilometres from the Peel region boundary. Renee handles product development and supplier relationships. I run operations, fulfilment, and the numbers. We ship nationally, work with two small regional stockists in the South West, and we're still small enough that I pack most of the orders myself on Thursday and Friday mornings. That suits us fine for now.
— Built slowly, on purpose, in the jarrah country. — SCOTT, SCOTT LANYON COOKE
Journal
How we finally found a seed supplier worth trusting
After three failed batches from two different suppliers, we drove four hours north and found exactly what we were looking for.
Last October I ordered 2 kilograms of native seed mix from a supplier I'd found through a gardening forum. The germination rate was somewhere around 20 percent. I replanted, adjusted the soil pH, tried again. Same result. Claire, who handles most of the product sourcing side of things, said we needed to actually go and meet whoever was growing and processing our seed stock rather than ordering off a website and hoping. She was right, as she usually is about these things.
We ended up driving up to a small operation outside Bindoon, about 90 minutes north of Perth on Noongar country. The owner, a retired botanist who'd been collecting and processing West Australian native seed for nearly 18 years, walked us through his drying sheds. Everything was labelled by species, collection site, and harvest date. He could tell us the exact provenance of each batch. That level of record-keeping is not common. Most seed wholesalers can't tell you which paddock something came from, let alone the year.
What ended up in our Aussie Native Seed Mix reflects that conversation. We settled on a blend weighted toward species that actually establish well in the jarrah forest fringe and the drier inland gardens around Dwellingup: Hardenbergia comptoniana, Verticordia nitens, Scaevola aemula, and a few others. We tested the current batch ourselves in our own back garden over summer. Germination came in at 74 percent across three test plots, which is a number I'm genuinely comfortable standing behind.
Claire grew up in Mudgee, where her family ran a mixed orchard, so she has an instinct for what good growing stock looks like that I, coming from an industrial design background, simply don't have. I can look at a seed packet and read the data. She can look at the seed itself and tell you whether it's been stored correctly. That combination has saved us from making expensive mistakes more than once since we started Sable Hollow three years ago.
We're now on our second full season with this supplier and the relationship is working. He keeps a reserved allocation for us each harvest, which means we're not scrambling in spring when everyone else suddenly remembers they want to plant natives. It took longer than I would have liked to get here, but the seed quality is consistent and that matters more than convenience.
Pruning banksias and grevilleas without making a mess of it
Most people either prune too little or take off a third of the plant at once, and both approaches tend to end badly.
It is mid-winter here in Dwellingup and the Banksia menziesii in the front bed has just finished its main flowering flush. This is the window. You've got probably six weeks before new growth really pushes, and if you miss it you're either cutting into bud sites or waiting another year. I've made both mistakes. The pruning shears we sell came out of my own frustration with the tools I was using on our garden, a mix of cheap bypass secateurs that couldn't get through mature banksia stems without crushing them and a pair of loppers that were overkill for anything under 18mm.
The single most important thing with banksias is not to cut into old wood unless you genuinely have no choice. The rule I follow is: go back to a lateral shoot or a green stem junction, never past it. For Banksia menziesii specifically, I take off the spent flower spikes first, then assess the shape and remove crossing or downward-facing stems. The whole process on a medium-sized plant takes maybe 25 minutes if you're not second-guessing yourself every cut.
Grevilleas are a bit different. Grevillea 'Robyn Gordon', which is everywhere in WA gardens, actually responds well to harder pruning, up to about a third of the overall canopy, as long as you do it after flowering and before the heat of summer. We have four of them along the eastern fence line and I cut them back by roughly 30 centimeters each year. They've been in the ground for two years and are already bushier and more floriferous than when we planted them.
The bypass mechanism on our shears is the part Claire and I spent the most time on when we were specifying the product. A bypass cut, where one blade passes the other like scissors, bruises the stem far less than an anvil cut. For woody-stemmed natives this matters because bruising creates an entry point for fungal problems, and once you get Phytophthora into a banksia you're done. The blade geometry on ours is set to a 25-degree angle, which keeps the cut clean on stems up to 20mm.
I sharpen ours every 6 to 8 weeks during the main growing season using a small diamond file. It takes about four minutes. A sharp blade does less damage to the plant and is less tiring on your hand over the course of an hour's work. These are obvious things but they're worth saying because most people I know wait until their secateurs are visibly struggling before they think about maintenance.
What the third bench production run actually taught us
We changed the joinery method halfway through a 40-unit run and it cost us two weeks, but the finished product is better for it.
In September we started our third production run of the Rustic Garden Bench, 40 units, which is the largest batch we've done. The first two runs were 12 and 18 units respectively, small enough that I could be hands-on with the joiner at every stage. At 40, I couldn't be, and that's where things got interesting. The joiner we work with is based in Dwellingup, about 10 minutes from us, and he's been making furniture for 30 years. He is not a man who changes his methods easily, which is usually an asset.
The issue came up around the mortise and tenon joints on the side rails. In the first two runs, we'd used a traditional pegged joint with a hardwood dowel. It looked good and held well in our own garden over 14 months of wet winters and dry summers. But at higher volume, the hand-fitting required for each joint was creating inconsistency, some joints were tight, some had a small amount of play. Not structural, but visible to anyone who looked. Claire noticed it immediately when she photographed the first batch of the new run for the website.
We stopped the run at unit 22. The joiner and I spent a day and a half testing an alternative, a drawbored mortise and tenon where the offset hole pulls the joint tight mechanically as the peg is driven. It's not a new technique, it's been used in timber framing for centuries, but it required him to adjust his jig setup and slow down slightly per joint. He agreed it was the better outcome. The remaining 18 benches came out with noticeably tighter, more consistent joints.
The two-week delay cost us real money. We had pre-orders waiting and had to send an honest email explaining what happened and why. Four customers asked to cancel. Thirty-six didn't. I found that ratio reassuring, and I also think the explanation mattered. People who buy a garden bench are not buying something disposable. They want to know that someone thought carefully about how it goes together.
We're now working with the joiner on a revised jig setup that should make the drawbore method faster in the next run. He's also suggested a slight increase in the rail timber section from 38mm to 42mm, which would add maybe $14 per unit in material cost but improve the visual weight of the bench. We're testing a prototype now. I'll write about it when I know how it turns out.
January in Dwellingup, and what the garden is telling us
We had six days over 38 degrees in a row this month, and the garden sorted itself into things that cope and things that don't.
January was harsh. Six consecutive days over 38 degrees in the third week of the month, which is not unusual for the Perth Hills fringe but still lands differently when you're standing in it. The jarrah forest around us goes very quiet in that kind of heat. The birds move early and disappear by 9am. By 11 the air smells faintly of resin. We water at 5:30 in the morning and don't go back out until late afternoon, which is more or less how you have to operate if you want to keep plants alive and yourself functional.
What I noticed this summer is that the native plantings we put in 18 months ago, the ones that came out of our own Aussie Native Seed Mix trials, have handled the heat substantially better than the mixed cottage bed along the south fence. The Scaevola and Hardenbergia looked fine through the heat event. The salvias and lavender in the cottage bed dropped their leaves and two plants didn't come back. I'm not entirely surprised. Claire has been saying for two years that we should reduce the proportion of Mediterranean species in that bed and replace them with local provenance plants. The January heat made the argument for her.
The EcoGrow Planting Kit was something we put together partly in response to questions we kept getting from customers in Perth's outer suburbs and in towns like Collie and Narrogin, places with similar summer profiles to ours, about how to establish new plantings through summer without losing everything. The kit is built around a soil wetter formulated for WA's hydrophobic sandy soils, which is the specific problem those customers were describing. Water runs off or pools on the surface rather than penetrating. Once you fix that, establishment becomes much more manageable even in heat.
We've had 14 millimetres of rain since November 1. That's the driest start to a wet season we've had since we moved here. The jarrah understorey is showing it. Grass trees that would normally be putting on new growth are sitting still. The marri in the paddock behind our place dropped about a third of its leaves in December, which is a stress response, not disease. It will recover when the rains come. This is what the forest does. It's been doing it for a long time.
Claire has started keeping a simple garden journal, not for the business, just for us. Rainfall, temperature spikes, what flowered when, what died. She started it in April last year and we already find ourselves referring back to it. Knowing that the Verticordia flowered two weeks earlier this year than last, or that we had our first 35-degree day three weeks earlier than in 2023, is the kind of information that takes years to accumulate and is genuinely useful for knowing when to plant, when to prune, and when to just leave things alone.
Customer reviews
Megan T. — Northcote, VIC — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Solid shears, actually sharp out of the box
Ordered the Sable Pruning Shears on a Tuesday and they showed up Thursday, which I wasn't expecting. The blades are genuinely sharp — I used them straight away on my rose bushes without any adjustment. Good weight in the hand, not too heavy. Happy with this purchase.
James R. — New Farm, QLD — 2024-06-02 — 4/5
Great bench, delivery took a while
The Rustic Garden Bench looks exactly like the photos and feels solid — no wobble, good finish on the timber. Delivery to QLD took about 10 days, which was a bit longer than I expected, though I get that it's a big item coming from WA. Would still buy from Sable Hollow again.
Priya S. — Surry Hills, NSW — 2024-08-19 — 5/5
EcoGrow kit is a genuinely good starter set
Bought the EcoGrow Planting Kit as a first attempt at growing my own herbs on a balcony. Everything I needed was in the box — clear instructions, decent quality pots, and the soil mix worked well. Three weeks in and things are actually sprouting. Good value for $99.
Louise B. — Fremantle, WA — 2024-10-07 — 5/5
Watering can does the job without any fuss
The Sable Watering Can is straightforward and well made. The rose head gives a nice even flow — good for seedlings without flattening them. At $29.95 I wasn't expecting much, but it's been in daily use for a couple of months now with no issues.
Daniel K. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-11-22 — 4/5
Seed mix arrived well packaged
The Aussie Native Seed Mix came in good condition — sealed properly and with a clear guide on planting times and spacing. I've planted about half of it so far and germination rates look decent. Would be nice if the packet listed the exact species breakdown on the front rather than just inside.
Sarah W. — Paddington, QLD — 2025-01-09 — 5/5
Ordered as a gift, recipient was stoked
Got the EcoGrow Planting Kit as a birthday gift for my mum. The gift wrapping option at checkout was handy, and the card arrived with the right message. Mum said it all arrived in good shape and she's already started planting. Easy process from order to delivery.
Tom H. — Glenelg, SA — 2025-02-28 — 4/5
Pruning shears — good quality, spring a bit stiff
The Sable Pruning Shears cut cleanly through small branches and the grip is comfortable. The spring mechanism was quite stiff out of the box and took a few sessions to loosen up. Not a dealbreaker, but worth noting if you have any hand strength issues. Otherwise a solid tool.
Claire M. — Hobart, TAS — 2025-04-15 — 5/5
Quick shipping to Tassie, impressed
I usually brace myself for slow delivery times down here, but the watering can arrived in four business days via standard post. Packaging was minimal but the can came through without any dents. Does exactly what it needs to do and looks good on the deck.
Shipping
All Sable Hollow orders are dispatched from our workshop in Dwellingup, Western Australia. Standard orders are shipped via Australia Post and typically arrive within 3–8 business days, depending on your location. Express orders are handled through StarTrack and arrive within 1–3 business days for most metropolitan areas. Orders placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day. Orders placed after that cutoff, or on weekends and public holidays, are dispatched the next available business day. Free standard shipping applies automatically to all orders over $100 AUD at checkout.
We ship Australia-wide, including regional and remote areas. Delivery to remote NT, far north QLD, and some rural WA postcodes may take up to 12 business days on standard shipping — we'll always send you a tracking number so you can follow your parcel. All prices on our site include GST. We pack orders carefully using recycled materials where possible to keep things secure in transit. Large items like the Rustic Garden Bench are packed with additional protective wrapping and dispatched via StarTrack freight.
If your order arrives damaged, take photos of the packaging and the item before doing anything else, then contact us at hello@sablehollow.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll work with you to resolve it quickly — either through a replacement, a refund, or a credit, depending on what works best. We lodge any freight claims on your behalf so you don't have to deal with the carrier directly. Please don't discard the damaged packaging until we've confirmed we don't need it for the claim.
Returns
We want you to be happy with what you've bought from us. If you're not, you can return most items within 30 days of delivery for a refund or exchange, provided the item is unused, in its original condition, and returned in its original packaging. To start a return, email hello@sablehollow.com.au with your order number and a brief description of the issue. We'll reply within 1–2 business days with return instructions. Return shipping costs for change-of-mind returns are the responsibility of the customer unless the item is faulty or was sent in error.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) apply to every purchase from Sable Hollow. If a product has a major fault, is not fit for its described purpose, or doesn't match what was advertised, you're entitled to a repair, replacement, or full refund — regardless of our standard 30-day window. You don't need to return a faulty item to its original packaging for a warranty or ACL claim. If you believe your item has a manufacturing defect, contact us with photos and we'll assess it promptly. We don't try to talk people out of legitimate claims.
Certain items are excluded from change-of-mind returns: the Aussie Native Seed Mix and any other perishable or living planting products cannot be returned once they've left us, for biosecurity and hygiene reasons. Items that have been used, altered, or damaged after delivery are also excluded from change-of-mind returns. Once we receive and inspect a returned item, refunds are processed within 5–7 business days back to your original payment method. If you paid by credit card, allow a few extra days for your bank to process it. We'll email you once the refund has been issued.