Westfield Queensland

We maintain the interior planting in all six Queensland Westfield centres, and have done continuously since 2014. A contract of that scale runs to well over 7,000 plants.

The centres

The portfolio covers Chermside, Carindale, Mt Gravatt, North Lakes, Helensvale and Coomera, and the scale varies widely between them. One centre carries close to a third of the total on its own, while the smallest sit in the hundreds.

Why retail is hard

Shopping centres are among the most demanding interior environments in the country for living plants. A single centre presents every extreme at once. Dim food courts. Skylit malls where the light moves through the day. Hot entries. Back of house with no natural light at all.

Add 74.6 million visits a year across the portfolio, constant dust, and long trading days seven days a week.

The brief from Scentre Group has never been a single moment of impact. It is that the greenery reads as effortless, every day, in every zone, across six sites.

What that takes

Each centre is serviced daily: watering, feeding, pruning, foliage cleaning, dust removal, pest monitoring, and replacing anything below standard.

Each centre carries its own service schedule, plant register and standard. Replacement and remedial work happens outside trading hours, with tools and green waste cleared before the doors open.

Six sites at once takes systems rather than goodwill: scheduled routing, digital service records, and enough crew depth to cover leave without the plants noticing.

Why the plants last

Our model pays us to keep plants alive, not to sell replacements. In an environment this hostile, where replacing a struggling plant is always the easy option, that distinction does more environmental work than any product we could specify.

It shows up as a number we track. Plants average 4.8 years in place at Chermside, our largest centre, and 2.8 years at Mt Gravatt. Every year a plant holds its position is a plant not grown, freighted, potted and thrown away, and a plant that has already acclimatised is more likely to survive the year after that as well.

The people

None of that works without people who stay. Our indoor team of twenty has had no turnover for sixteen consecutive months and averages 4.4 years’ tenure. Aimee Hansen, who services Coomera and Helensvale, has been with us twenty years, and won Technician Recognition at the 2026 International Plantscape Awards.

Technicians train through our learning management system and site knowledge is written down, so when someone does leave it does not show up in the plants.

When a plant does need swapping, it goes out the same week and is replaced with an established specimen of matching size rather than a smaller one. A decline should never be visible to a shopper.

Twelve years

Across those years the centres themselves have kept changing. Mt Gravatt was redeveloped in 2014, North Lakes added its dining precinct in 2015, Chermside expanded its fashion and outdoor dining in 2017, Coomera opened in 2018, and Carindale refurbished its food court in 2024. Each of those meant rescoping, replanting and re-establishing while the centre traded around us.

This is a project measured in years rather than in openings, and that is the whole point of it.