Feefo, the gold standard of customer review platforms, has awarded us their 2025 Platinum Trusted Service Award
Table of Contents
Thank you very much to everyone
Who gave us a nice Feefo review.
I should be giving you all the attention right now, you deserve it.
I hope that your plants are settling in nicely. If anything goes wrong with them, please contact us, and we will do our best to fix it: terms and conditions apply, your mileage may vary.
The Platinum Trusted Service Award is effectively Feefo’s highest award: they only give their Exceptional Award to 8 businesses in total, worldwide, which doesn’t mean we aren’t trying for it!
At time of writing in January 2025, looking back at 2024,
- Got 351 service reviews, averaging 4.8 out of 5 stars
- Got 544 product reviews, averaging 4.7 out of 5 stars
- Got 14 bad service reviews, which means we stuffed up barely more than 1 order per month.
Several of those bad reviews were by people who did not contact us first and give us a chance to provide good service… - Delivered over 29,382 orders, which means a whopping 29,031 orders did not get a review, that’s 98.8%!
You will decide for yourself what that response rate means.
For me, when I’m busy, I often fail to leave a positive review, especially if it was an order that simply went smoothly and required no interaction with the company’s support team.
But when I have a bad experience, I will find the time to leave that bad review!
So let’s have a look at our 3-star or worse reviews.
There are 14 bad service reviews, which I will share grouped by type of complaint, followed by an explanation, which is not the reply that we sent to the customer, it’s written specially for you, dear reader.
Wherever humanly possible, I will take full responsibility for blaming the long-suffering courier companies that we use to deliver your plants.
Ashridge Bad Reviews Review
I Blame The Couriers…
Review: Plants arrived broken and useless as the packaging was so poor they didn’t stand a chance . To be fair Ashridge did refund the full amount once I complained.
Explanation: Given that we delivered close to 30,000 orders without a hitch, it’s fair to say that our packaging is adeqate, and our couriers do a great job most of the time.
But it doesn’t matter how rare this is when it’s your plants
Once an order goes out our door, it’s in the couriers’ hands, and all we can do is make it right when they squish it beyond recognition. Which we did.
We Can’t Fix Our Mistakes if You Don’t Contact Us!
Review: “Poor customer service. No ability to speak directly to staff. Order was missing items, and then when replacements sent they were not of the same size as supposed to be.”
Explanation: Missing plants is always a weird one: how can anyone prove that plants were missing? We have a triple check process at our end, using two people, to ensure we get the order right, so we just have to trust people when they say plants were missing.
We sent replacements immediately, then heard nothing from the customer until they gave use this bad review.
We’ve fixed our phones, see below.
Review: The plants came fairly quickly but in poor condition.
Explanation: We can’t say much because it appears the customer didn’t contact or reply to us.
We do chase people to help resolve their issue, and our team is also busy with people waiting to talk to them, so we just won’t manage to save everyone.
Email Glitch
Review: Thank you for sending the plants and root grow through safely. However, when I have bought bare root trees and shrubs I don’t expect to be bombarded with requests for reviews within weeks of receiving them.
Explanation: This was totally our fault. We had to refresh our Feefo email database, and did not notice that one setting had accidentally changed.
This resulted in a batch of customers receiving one feedback request email per product, not one email with all the products in it.
We fixed this one-off email glitch immediately.
Delayed Delivery
Review: “Delivery far too slow. Plants were mostly dead”
Explanation: The three people who reviewed oak, and five who reviewed hawthorn saplings were happy with their plants. We deliver many thousands of those plants, with no complaints. However they died, they were covered by our bareroot guarantee.
This customer did not contact us before leaving a review.
Review: The product is as expected for whips. However, we asked that they keep them until we asked them to send them when we made contact. They are to go around a new agricultural building and were sent before we were ready or the land was to plant them. We didn’t make contact so we’re not expecting a delivery out the blue. Wasn’t ideal for us and rushing around bodging the planting area.
Explanation: This was unfortunate, we mishandled the customer’s request not to send the order until they made contact.
However, there was no need for them to rush planting, we do make it clear in delivery emails that these dormant bareroot plants would be fine stored in their packaging for weeks, you only need to keep the roots moist.
We have since updated our Customer Service message system to prevent this
Phone Woes
Review: “Generally, the service with Ashridge Trees is relatively good. Sadly, you are not able to contact them by phone any more to discuss issues – advice. The only means of contact is via email. This is a big step backwards in customer service”
Explanation: Absolutely. Our phones lines need to “talk” to our computer system, which went through several upgrades last year, breaking the phones each time.
We were fuming about how long it took to sort everything out, and we weren’t alone! We were at the mercy of the merciless machine elves, and apologise to everyone who was inconvenienced.
Our phone lines are back, attending to sales enquiries, and support calls for orders that have already been placed online.
To make our phone lines resilient, we don’t take card payment by phone; we send you a secure payment link.
Bashed Bulbs
Review: “Winter Aconites: Plants arrived broken and useless as the packaging was so poor they didn’t stand a chance. To be fair Ashridge did refund the full amount once I complained”
Explanation: This was one of only two bulb orders, out of several thousand, that went wrong.
We can’t blame the couriers for this one: we didn’t pack the bulbs properly.
By the time this review came in, the packer responsible had already quit.
Review: “The snowdrops arrived dead, even though their emails / website said the delivery would be okay out of water / not planted for a number of days. So this was very disappointing.”
Explanation: This customer did not contact us when they received their order. This was our second and final negative review for our bulbs in the green last year.
Sweet Pea Suffocation
Review: “The website said that plug plants would be packed to last for ten days, but whether the Courier kept them longer or not I don’t know, but I came to plant them three days after delivery and more than half the plugs were dried out and yellowed and are not progressing as well as they should.”
Explanation: We are guilty as charged for misleading this person.
They received a confirmation email that contained advice about receiving dormant bareroot plants in Winter, which can indeed be left in their packaging for 10 days, unlike growing seedlings, which can’t.
That distinction is obvious to us “professionals”, but we clearly needed to be clearer!
Everyone else who reviewed them was happy with their sweet pea plugs.
We have updated the advice on our website & emails to clarify and stress that you must unpack your seedlings on arrival
Bareroot Plant Bemusement
Review: “Looked dead on arrival..and still no signs of life?”
Explanation: Bareroot plants arrive with no leaves on them, and typically take much longer to come into leaf than other plants of the same species that are established in the area. That’s just how they are naturally.
This customer did not contact us before leaving a review.
Everyone else who left a review was happy with our Green Beech hedging.
Define “Standard Tree”
Review: “Service good. Very poor product not a standard tree branches come from the bottom nothing at the top”
Explanation: This was due to teething problems with our new website: the sizes were labelled correctly in our database, but the price grid that customers saw was squashing some text into the wrong lines when viewed on certain mobiles, or when zoomed in on a desktop monitor.
This was a temporary problem with our website that affected a handful of visitors, and has been fixed.
Hapless Herbs
Review: “Lemon Verbena: I bought 2 plants. One I gave to my friend. The other I kept. Both ended up with brown spots, which I used an app to confirm as diseased. I’ve tried to remove all the bad bits, but it’s not a big plant so there is pretty much nothing left. My friend has the same result. I’ve written to Ashridge. They want photos of the location etc. I had sent a pic of my plant, but it’s so annoying to have to submit everything. I’ve ordered plants online from other companies and never had a problem. I’d just like my money back”
Explanation: Our replacement guarantee T’s & C’s are clear about us needing a photo of the plants.
This was the only report we had all year about disease on Lemon Verbena, and we refunded after they provided more photos; the customer is right, we did handle this refund slower than we should have.
One other person left a review and was happy.
We have stopped selling small herb plants.
Perennial Problems
Review: “The plants were entirely pot-bound. The response was inadequate, and I am unlikely to use Ashridge again.”
Explanation: The plants on the left and in the middle are in the early stages of being pot bound, but the plant on the right is great: filling the pot without being pot-bound at all, loads of dark soil clearly visible down to the bottom.
In all three cases, the roots are healthy as can be, white or yellow in colour, because the plants were properly watered and fed on the nursery.
They do need teasing out or slicing, and this low level of pot-bound is typical for vigorous perennials bought in garden centres: they go from not filling the pot to being slightly pot-bound in a matter of weeks.
For those reasons, we did not refund this customer, but we should have sent them a gift voucher.
Being pot-bound is much worse for woody plants than it is for herbaceous plants like these. A couple of minutes work to tease them out, maybe a little slicing as shown in the video below, and they will grow away beautifully.
A smaller, more razor sharp knife is better for small plants like the ones above, for cutting a fine slice of root off all around.
We have simplified our range of herbaceous perennials to ensure higher quality.
Recap: what we are doing differently to improve
We have already:
- Stopped selling the most fragile herbs & perennial plants
- Simplified our remaining range of perennials to ensure higher quality
- Adjusted our Customer Service message system to deal with orders where we run out of stock due to the last remaining plants failing inspection, and where the customer wants us to wait for their signal before delivering
- Improved advice on the website & in emails for seedling plug plants
- Fixed our phones lines – that was a nightmare for everyone!