Brooker Executive Perspective:
Fiona Forbes, CEO of The Diggers Club
For Fiona Forbes, gardens are far more than beautiful spaces; they are engines of community, wellbeing, and personal agency. Having spent a lifetime visiting and loving gardens, she sees their true power in how they make people feel: present, grounded, and connected.
Today, Fiona leads The Diggers Club and Foundation, a certified social enterprise and multi-channel, multi-site membership organisation stewarding three public gardens and a diverse set of operations spanning horticulture and seed stewardship, retail nurseries and e-commerce, hospitality, publishing, education programs, and philanthropic initiatives. Best known for its unique and extensive heirloom seed collection, Diggers has been operating for nearly 50 years. In this operationally complex environment, Fiona drives sustainable growth and member value through a clear transformation agenda, strengthening capability, systems, and operating rhythm while protecting the legacy and trust of a long-standing national brand.
Leighton:
The Diggers Club is quite different to your previous employers, but on a personal level what really draws you to gardens?
Fiona: I have always enjoyed visiting gardens and creating my own garden. It’s how they make me feel. When you’re in those environments, you’re totally present, and everything else just falls away. You’re focused on what you’re doing, you’re using your hands, your senses, and it just sort of happens magically.
We’ve got three amazing, very different gardens, and the experience you get walking into each of them is my real drawcard. I do love to plant things. Luckily, I am surrounded by experts who are now my brain trust and give me specialist advice, and I really lean into that knowledge and advice every day.
Leighton: You’ve talked about gardening, wellness and community. What are a couple of key things Diggers is doing in that space?
Fiona: From a growth perspective, that wellness area is huge, especially for women between 30 and 55, which is where we’re really focusing on growing our membership base. They want to be able to grow in any environment: urban gardens, balcony gardens, and small spaces. It’s not just about established gardens; our survey told us that the top three reasons our members and customers garden are:
- To grow their own food – food security and economic benefit for their families
- To beautify their gardens
- To enhance their health and wellbeing – how gardening makes them feel
Right now, we’re stabilising the business and really curating our range back to what we want to be famous for. Our heirloom seed collection is a key point of difference as we have seeds and varieties which are exclusive to Diggers – our members love to grow vegetables in particular, which are totally unique, and taste amazing – our primary purpose is to propagate and sell these seeds to our members.
Education is another core area. Our gardens are essentially living classrooms for our members. We can connect people to biodiversity, adapting their gardens to the climate conditions to make them sustainable.
This year, Diggers has become the first Australian organisation to partner with the Royal Horticultural Society UK in their international garden network, an exciting development that fuels new partnerships and value for our members. We are looking to work more closely with their science and research teams to share experiences. In the UK, the weather is changing dramatically, which has prompted the RHS to design a garden that survives without regular watering. I can’t imagine England without the rain; it is staggering how fast change is happening around the world.
Leighton:
If you could snap your fingers and change something at a sector or societal level, what would it be?
Fiona: One of the key innovations I’d love to work on is taking the garden experience to people who can’t physically get to a garden. Our gardens are not accessible to wheelchairs and mobility-challenged visitors.
I am interested in how we tackle loneliness in the world. I read some recent research which said that up to 25% of the world’s population is experiencing loneliness, and so connection to community is even more important as we live more isolated lives.
I love to look at new and emerging technologies, and once worked on a project where we created augmented reality content for use in health education. It has got me thinking about how we at Diggers could create content that is immersive and takes gardens to anyone who has a pair of glasses/goggles. Access to this technology used to cost thousands of dollars, but it is now available for a few hundred.
Diggers can help connect to the local gardening community through our membership – there is a definite trend away from “talking to everyone” on big global channels, toward connecting locally with like-minded people.
That’s why we’re looking at how we bring members into our gardens to create opportunities for connection and sharing, and how we take content into local communities. For example, we are supporting a wellbeing program at our local RSL, talking to veterans. Giving them the opportunity to learn something they may never have thought about, such as gardening, will give them that sense of agency. It doesn’t matter how big your plot is; it could just be growing a herb garden on your benchtop.
Leighton:
Shifting to your career, what have been some key moments or pivot points for you? Were there people or experiences that particularly shaped you?
Fiona: I’ve had a really varied career. I started in property development and real estate, then moved into health, which I loved. I realised very early on that I need to do work that’s meaningful and ideally do some good in the world. When I’m not in a purpose‑driven role, it doesn’t give me the same sense of personal satisfaction, and it is more difficult to be as passionate about the role.
So purpose became a non‑negotiable pillar for me. I like working hard, but I want that effort to do some good. Looking back now, one strong thread has been my ability to communicate and influence change, the willingness to speak up and question the status quo. That hasn’t always served me well; sometimes you become the catalyst for change, and not every environment welcomes that. But it’s who I am, and I know how to galvanise a group to get cohesion and change happening.
I used to worry a lot in my 30s about my career progression. It was a time when I had a young family and so many competing priorities, it was difficult to get everything right. Now, I’d tell my younger self: Don’t worry. You can catch up again, but I would highly recommend honouring the chapter in your life with family and kids.
I grew up being told that ‘you can have it all’, you know, through the 70s, where society was changing for working women, but what I realised is that you can have it all, but not at the same time. And it’s true.
Many women in my cohort have learned that the hard way: you really can’t do everything all at once without damaging yourself.
Leighton:
You’ve had a non-linear career across sectors. What do you see as the benefits of that kind of path?
Fiona: I’ve always had that communications thread, working across change, internal and external communication, corporate affairs, etc. and was lucky to work in many industry sectors including health, energy, property, insurance and tourism. Through my late 30s and well into my 40s, I’d regularly come up against recruiters who said, “You don’t have sector experience.” I’d argue, “Communications is communications. The content can come from subject-matter experts. The capability that sits above that – how you do it – is transferable.”
I think multi‑industry experience is a huge advantage. When I was consulting, I’d often sit with clients and say, “You’re not alone, I’ve seen this in other industries.” It made them feel so much better, because they often thought it was just them failing.
I had a woman on my team who’d been at CBA until her mid‑30s and wanted to move into PR. There was a debate about paying her as a junior. I pushed back hard: you can’t ignore the industry experience and maturity she brings; she’ll catch up on the PR craft quickly. It’s about how you frame, utilise and sell those skills and experience to clients. She was a great asset to our fintech clients.
Leighton:
As a CEO now, how do you stay motivated and grounded during challenging times?
Fiona: While there are many great parts of being a CEO, it can also feel quite lonely at times. You can’t always talk openly about your doubts or vulnerabilities internally. You have to show up in a certain way. I’ve had moments of thinking, “I must be doing this really badly,” but you can’t just voice that in the business.
So I’ve consciously cultivated a bench of people externally: mentors, coaches, people I’ve worked with before, with whom I can bounce things around. I need to test my thinking a lot, and I go to people who are real experts in their fields and really enjoy the insights they can offer.
Leighton:
You’re leading significant change at Diggers. What do you see as the most important leadership skills in that kind of transformation?
Fiona: We’re turning this business around. It’s a big transformation, and there are people who’ve been here a long time. Taking them on the “why” journey is a constant conversation. The skills I think are critical are:
- Listening. I don’t have all the ideas. When I started, I did a listening tour and asked everyone, “If you had my job, what would you do?” That gave me the bones of our future strategy, as there were some great ideas in the business already. I continue to ask for their input.
- Consultation and transparency. I’ve seen a lot of change programs. Leaders who keep everything secret create huge mistrust. You need to share as much as you can, at all the critical points, and keep talking about the why.
- Building a culture of contribution. When I did the listening tour, one of the strongest messages was, “No one has asked us before.” They had become used to simply waiting for instructions. I want people to be fully engaged, passionate, and willing to speak up.
- Decisiveness and vulnerability. You do have to make decisions. Sometimes they’ll be wrong. I’m very open about that. I’ll say, “I made a decision; on reflection, it wasn’t right. I can see it didn’t work, so I’m pivoting, and we’re doing this instead.” Being human about it goes a long way. Making no decision is worse than making a less‑than‑perfect one. You can always adjust, but you do have to move forward.
Leighton:
How are you thinking about AI and emerging technologies in the Diggers context?
Fiona: I think AI could be incredibly exciting for our industry. We’re really looking at how we can integrate it right through the business and build capacity for people to tap into it in their roles.
At the moment, some of the leadership team are using AI regularly for insights and strategic decision-making, but I feel like we’re just scratching the surface.
I’m particularly interested in using AI to look outside the business for inspiration and emerging ideas. I would like to combine AI and augmented reality with our physical gardens and seed bank to create new experiences.
I’m constantly curious; I always have been. I love going down rabbit holes, reading widely, seeing what someone has done elsewhere, and then asking how we might adapt that to the industry I’m in. With Diggers, we’ve spent the last 18 months catching up to the rest of the market. I feel like we are almost there, but the next leap has to be about being five years ahead. I’m really focused on what’s emerging and how we can be truly innovative, not just going with the flow, but questioning how we keep ahead of our competition and offer a great value proposition to our members.
At an offsite, we asked the team to “blue sky” crazy ideas. One team said, “What if we built a garden you could walk through underground, to see how plants grow and see all the roots?” I don’t even know exactly how you’d do it, but I thought that’s really interesting. Imagine the critters down there!
Given we’re also talking about a seed bank and a seed vault idea, you can start to see these elements connecting: heirloom seeds, underground experiences, AI, and augmented reality. It’s a really fun and fertile space to be playing in.
Fiona, thanks so much for taking the time to wander through these ideas with me. Your honesty about leadership, purpose and the power of gardens to connect people has been both refreshing and inspiring. I’m looking forward to seeing where you and Diggers take things next.
– Leighton Cantrill
For more information, visit The Diggers Club or connect with Fiona Forbes on LinkedIn.