About us

A Collection That Outgrew a Roof Terrace

The nursery grew out of a private collection that reached about eight hundred plants and had comprehensively defeated the roof terrace it lived on. Its owner, a biologist by training, had spent years correcting the names on plants bought from garden centres and had come to the conclusion that the trade's casual attitude to identification was the single biggest obstacle to anyone learning to grow these plants properly. Selling correctly named plants was the obvious response.

We propagate almost everything ourselves, from seed of documented wild or collection origin and from cuttings of our own mother plants, and we keep the records that make the label meaningful. Where a name is genuinely uncertain we label it as such rather than guessing, and where a plant is a hybrid or a cultivar we say so. Collectors care about this deeply; beginners benefit from it without realising, because a correct name is the key to every piece of care advice that follows.

Plants are grown hard: bright light, generous ventilation, mineral compost, a genuinely dry winter and no forced feeding. They grow more slowly than nursery stock raised warm and wet, and they arrive dense, well-spined, properly coloured and able to survive the transition to your windowsill. A soft plant looks wonderful for a month and then etiolates, drops its colour and rots at the base, and the customer concludes they have no talent for growing.