Chris and Nerida Cuddy are preparing for the official opening of the Perenniale Plants Nursery and Emporium at 29 Gaskill Street, the commercial building formerly owned by the late Charlie McCarron.

The Cuddy's will officially launched their new business on April 21 at 5pm with RSVPs essential by April 16 due to COVID regulations.

Specialising in drought and frost tolerant, and rare plants, propagated here in Canowindra the business includes a very beautiful emporium with a huge range of interesting, quality garden tools, homewares, bulbs and seeds, and eco-friendly products.

The new building gives the Cuddy's seven times the space of the old emporium.

In October of 2019, Chris Cuddy was considering taking on night work, in order to keep his nursery business afloat due to the impact of the drought on sales.

A horticultural scientist, Chris has built the business from its beginnings in 2010, travelling to several plant festivals and field days each year, including the Collectors' Plant Fair in Sydney.

Although word was building about his specialist nursery, such that garden clubs and tours were visiting, and the mail order side of the business was slowly growing, the drought and accompanying water restrictions were taking their toll on customers' ability to buy plants.

A year earlier, Chris had had to let two casual staff go and had been doing all the work of maintaining a large display garden, propagating and potting up plants, creating artwork and a website, and running the business himself.

It was hard to see how he could keep it all going, with night work on top of everything else.

Around this time, Grace Brennan of Walgett, NSW, came up with the brilliant idea of encouraging city friends to support her friends' drought-impacted businesses - and Buy From the Bush was born.

The idea took off, people in the city being more than happy to have a simple, practical and highly effective way of helping drought-stricken rural areas.

Earlier in 2019, Chris had taken the risk of investing in a new website host.

He'd also grown the emporium side of the business - to offset the impact of the drought on plant sales - importing beautiful garden tools from England along with other high quality products.

Finally, one of his social media posts was publicised by Buy from the Bush, and orders started to come in.

He sold all of his own English watering cans in stock, and then that weekend, he kept ordering one more each time an order came in (all he could afford to do!) until he had made eight orders in two days.

Eventually he sold all of the importer's remaining stock in Australia, for one particular model.

That Christmas, thanks to Buy from the Bush, sales had increased on the previous one by 1400%.

The family enjoyed a celebratory Christmas ham! Chris took on a trainee for 2020, and momentum continued to build, until the COVID lockdown inspired a gardening craze (along with a huge growth in online shopping) which took everything to a new level.

In June 2020, Chris and his family took a walk downtown on his birthday and noticed the beauty and potential of a fairly run down large building in Canowindra's main street.

After a long process of pushing on doors, the building was bought to enable a new adventure for the nursery and emporium.

The business continued to grow, allowing Chris to employ new part time and casual staff - by the time the new shop officially opens on April 21, there will be two full time and up to six part time staff working busily alongside Chris in the beautiful restored historic building in the main street of Canowindra.