The 94-year-old Dunedin identity has won the NZ Gardener 2009 Otago Gardener of the Year award, and is one of 13 regional finalists in the running for the national award.
For the past 25 years, Mrs Ibbotson has been creating gift cards and has raised $56,000 for more than 30 charities.
"I didn't expect producing cards would lead to a gardening award."
However, gardening was "in the blood", she said, and she got out in her rambling Roslyn garden whenever she could, helped by a gardener once a month.
"I love my garden, but it is too big for me."
Her joy was flowers, with her favourites for the cards being violas, verbenas and nigella, complemented by chickweed, grass seed and maidenhair fern.
She could not stop picking flowers and putting them between the pages of magazines to press.
Most nights she managed to put together about 30 cards, which she sold at various events, with funds going to her favourite causes, which at the moment were the Otago Community Hospice and the Orokonui Ecosanctuary.
NZ Gardener editor Lynda Hallinan said Mrs Ibbotson was a "national treasure".
"She spends up to three and a-half hours a night carefully arranging her dried flowers with a toothpick and glue to make her beautiful cards.
"That really is dedication."
Her prize was $1000 worth of gardening products.
The national award winner would be announced in October.
The 2009 regional winners were: May Hansen, Northland; Cynthia Landels, Auckland; Avis Leeson, Waikato; Georgina Campbell, Gisborne-Hawkes Bay; Ron Day, Manawatu-Wanganui; Geoff and May Kenyon, Taranaki; Denzil Philp, Wellington; Anne Murray, Nelson; Joshua Marshall, Marlborough; Stanley Hyde, West Coast; Susan Dent, Canterbury; Dawn Ibbotson, Otago; Marijke Aalders, Southland.
