The garden centre industry is a wonderful one, full of great people working in it and great customers intent on making their street that much more beautiful.
But maintaining a lush border of beautiful plants, penguins, and a specimen polar bear does not come cheap according to HortWeek:
I know what you all are thinking: how can you even have a garden, never mind Christmas, without a luminous fibreglass menagerie and suitable lighting? It’s almost too sad to think about, but there are people in this country who can only grow plants.
And about growing plants: what do plant nurseries and garden centres do for you, fundamentally?
We spend time growing plants, many years in some cases, and you swap either your money or, ideally, someone else’s, for all that growing time.
You get a plant of some mature size, ready to perform its role in your garden without you having to:
- Sow a seed and wait
- Graft a cutting onto a rootstock and wait
- Root a cutting and wait
Naturally, there is a conflict of interest between your patience and our profits. If you are happy to wait a few short years, you don’t need plants from garden centres or nurseries like us.
But since when was gardening about need? For most of us, it’s about getting the outdoor room looking the way you like it, providing the privacy, beauty, and perhaps pumpkins, that you desire for your home.
Which one feels better:
- Doing a load of work sowing and grafting and rooting, then working to maintain those plants for a few years until they are ready to fruit or flower.
- Going shopping and getting immediate garden gratification, with ample time left for lattes with the gang?
Buying seeds online is generally cheap, we sell the annual favourites, Cosmos and Sweetpea, and you can collect seeds from lots of plants around September-October.
Yew is an easy tree to grow from seed, but you’ll have to wait a few years for it to get as big as our seductively beefy big rootballed Yew hedge plants.
Cuttings are free, with permission of course, and fruit tree scions are available from several specialist nurseries in the UK, while small international growers use eBay to supply gardeners here with greenhouse exotics like avocado and citrus. We can’t vouch for them, but there are well rated sellers with funky varieties that are hard and/or expensive to buy elsewhere.
But when you want your fruit tree to hurry up and fruit while looking good, it makes sense to at least buy a maiden. You’ll save yourself a year from the time you graft a scion onto a rootstock.
If you have never taken cuttings before, this fiscal year is an especially profitable one to start. October is prime time to take hardwood cuttings, and you can practice with anything.
Growing a plant from a cutting makes it yours in a unique way that you can leverage to increase its sentimental value as a gift, making it even more special than the gifts we deliver to your loved ones.