The Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show is a fan favourite for Aussies across the nation.
Each year, MIFGs attracts over 100,000 visitors to see the winning gardens from famed landscape designers, the Great Hall of Flowers and hundreds of garden-themed events and attractions. For 2025, The Diggers Club is returning in full force with a new spectacle for crowds to marvel at.
There will be a huge display of over 1000 open-pollinated, heritage sunflowers for visitors to admire for the duration of the show. And it’s about so much more than just pretty flowers.
The ‘Follow the Sun’ campaign
For more than 45 years, The Diggers Club has been at the forefront of seed preservation and protecting Australian garden heritage. The MIFG’s sunflower display, aptly named ‘Follow the Sun, ‘ is a physical representation of the power of seed saving.
Anna-Lize Pretorius, the Seed Product Manager for The Diggers Club, explains that every sunflower in the exhibit has ‘started as a seed that has been saved, passed down, and nurtured over time.”
The giant sunflower display aims to demonstrate how growing open-pollinated and heirloom varieties of plants, like sunflowers, can help keep garden history alive and, in turn, protect plant diversity for the future. Anna-Lize describes seed-saving as ‘an act of resilience’ and explains:
“By preserving and sharing these varieties, we’re helping to protect plant diversity, support pollinators, and ensure that future generations can enjoy sunflowers in all their forms— not just the most commercially available types.”
All of the sunflowers in this exhibit are open-pollinated, which means that the plants have been pollinated naturally.
This can be done through cross-pollination from wind, water and animal pollinators like bees and butterflies. It can also be done through self-pollination, in which a plant has a male and female part so it can pollinate itself. Sunflowers can do both!
What does open-pollinated mean?
What will the sunflower exhibit look like at MIFGs?
There will be 8 different sunflower varieties and over 1000 sunflowers to look at! This display will be open to MIFGs ticket-holders from the 26-30 March in the Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens in Melbourne, VIC.
Visitors will be able to get up close and personal with each variety and notice the colour, height and diversity of these blooms. The display will also feature an interactive personality-style quiz – ‘Which Sunflower Are You?’. You can discover your sunflower match and share your results online using the hashtag #MySunflowerSelf.
For those who wish to take a piece of MIFGs home, you’ll be able to purchase limited-edition open-pollinated sunflower seed packs from The Diggers Club. You can then start your own sunflower display in the garden!
How to get involved before the show
Leading up to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (held in late March), you can send in your sunflower stories to The Diggers Club. From childhood memories to any backyard successes, they want to hear about it all! Selected stories will feature in a digital publication from the organisation.
