Rosa Calloway

Rosa keeps the indoor-plant and small-space coverage at Garden Care. She lives in Marrickville, in Sydney's inner west, in a two-bedroom worker's cottage with a 60 sqm courtyard garden that she has cultivated obsessively for the last six years. The courtyard is north-facing, gets four hours of summer sun and almost none in winter, and currently houses four citrus pots, a wall of potted herbs, two figs, an espaliered pear, and a hand-built vertical strawberry tower made by her partner Adi. Rosa worked as a graphic designer for eight years before a balcony herb-garden Instagram experiment went viral in 2020 and she pivoted to writing. She still designs the occasional book cover when the deadlines line up. She is married to Adi (a ceramicist whose pots fill the courtyard and most of the kitchen) and has a rescue cat called Pesto who has personally shredded several seedling trays. Rosa is the one to ask about getting twenty plants into a balcony without it looking like a botanical hoarder, choosing pots that will actually last a decade outdoors, and which indoor plants forgive a forgetful waterer. Her current side project is a salad-greens microbed under a grow light in the laundry — at last count it was producing more salad leaves than she and Adi can reasonably eat.