Catherine Schwerin trails off into tears as she details her hopes for a heartfelt tribute to her late sister.
"Well, I just hope … if she's somewhere there to see, I hope it touches her," she said.
Barely a fortnight has passed since the youngest of Ms Schwerin's sisters, Marielle Soni, succumbed to inoperable brain cancer, four-and-a-half years after it had first been removed.
Ms Soni had glioblastoma, a cancer only survived for more than a year by one in four patients, according to the Brain Tumour Charity.
Just 5 per cent of people with the disease survive past five years.
Ms Schwerin, her other two sisters, and Ms Soni's 16-year-old daughter Aamini travelled from Melbourne to a small flower farm in west Gippsland on Easter Monday.
It was there Aamini chose a variety of dahlia to be named after her mum.
"My sister loved purples," Ms Schwerin said.
"It was her lucky colour, the colour that brought her joy.
"She was also a huge fan of Prince."
The family had been contacted by an ABC Gippsland listener who'd heard about the farm's unique approach to naming new flowers.
"It was fitting that a Gippsland-bred flower would be named after a Gippsland girl," Ms Schwerin said.
David's dahlias
David Hansford said he liked everything to have its purpose.
"98-99 per cent of the dahlias go to use," he said, walking through rows of thousands of the flowers.
If they're not being cut, dug up, and shipped around the country, Mr Hansford's dahlias are donated to flood victims or local primary schools.
Mr Hansford said he had slowly built up a huge bank of hardy specimens over the past 15 years that had been cross-bred to create new, more resilient varietals of dahlia.
"You get to know which ones are the better seed parents and you just keep breeding from them," he said.
It has left Mr Hansford with the enormous task of finding names for more than 400 new varieties of dahlia in the next year.
"Each year we get on average about 300 new ones, so it's a big job to mark them all and get names for them," he said.
"I'm just not that creative."
So he put it out to the internet and received the suggestion of remembering people who died from brain cancer.
He said more and more families had contacted him to remember their loved ones, with some from as far away as Canberra wanting to pay tribute.
He said about 70 dahlia varietals had been named after people who had died from cancer.
"[I hope] it makes them [family members] happier, makes them think about their loved ones, makes them feel better," he said.
A life of colour
Ms Soni and her sisters grew up in Sale, east of Melbourne, but her work as an art specialist took her around Australia, including the Tiwi Islands.
She was also a founding member of what later became Victoria's Artbank.
D'Lan Contemporary manager Diane de Mascarel, who worked with Ms Soni at the Melbourne art gallery, said she was full of knowledge and passion for the art of First Nations artists.
"So it was really, really wonderful to have her join our team," Ms de Mascarel said.
"We feel very strongly that her legacy will live because she was just so passionate."
Ms Soni's family and the gallery have organised a memorial to be held at D'Lan on the last Sunday of April.
"She was working on an exhibition when she fell ill and she made sure that the spirit of her vision for that exhibition was conveyed," Ms Schwerin said.
"That's where that's going to be held, because it was her last special project."
"Colour was her signature, she loved the richness of everything, of the colours, of the joy that colours bring."
