This is one of those rare brief-and-to-the-point blogposts, totally lacking in any attempt at fine language and evocative descriptions. Basically, it’s a list of all the plants on the display and available for sale at our stand at RHS Malvern Show, 7th-10th May. We don’t have enough room on the sales table for them all […]

I don’t suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, not clinically, anyway. But I can’t deny the brightening effect that a spell of warm sunshine has on my mood. In early March I become a crashing weather bore, squinting at the sky, lamenting the glowering clouds and whingeing about the refrigerator-like temperature to anyone within earshot. The […]

In October my world is strewn with brown paper bags full of freshly collected seeds, rustling like oversized autumn leaves. The bags, with their turned over tops and black marker pen plant names are spilling over the potting shed benches, of course, but the sales shed has a pile on the desk and some have […]

It’s been a long summer of celebrations, reunions, and, for me, much reflection on events of the past thirty years or so. And as the summer slips away, this golden September has rekindled embers of earlier memories, of the long warm ‘Indian Summers’ of my childhood in East Sussex.  I know that memory is fickle […]

This year for the first time I strolled through to the entrance gates to Chelsea Flower Show early on Monday morning sporting a shiny Press Pass, courtesy of the RHS. How delightfully odd it was to have uncontested views of the main show gardens from any angle, odder still to walk through the near empty […]

I can’t write a blog post without good photos. And I can’t take a decent photo when a persistent cold wind whistles through the garden, keeping buds closed and making sharp focus impossible. But after weeks of chilly, blustery weather, today the wind finally dropped and the sky cleared into a perfect spring day. In […]

This is possibly going to be the dullest blogpost I have ever published. A small percentage of you might find it fascinating. I apologise unreservedly to everyone else. Mostly I only collect seed from species plants, but some of the cultivars below are entirely stable and are routinely grown from seed, e.g. Agastache ‘Liquorice Blue’. […]

Wednesday, 29th January 2014, mid-afternoon. Four degrees Celsius under a lowered, purplish-grey sky, not a breath of wind to stir the still-standing grasses in the square borders. It’s fine enough weather for working outside, as long as I go hard at it and keep up a sweat. If I stop to fumble about hand-dividing a […]

So, two days, 150 or so retweets and 1000 page views later, I thought I’d update you re our campaign against the EU Plant Reproductive Material laws (see my earlier blogpost). If you’ve been dipping in and out on Twitter you’ll have noticed several UK nurseries expressing concern, as well as gardeners all over the […]