From stock plant to your plant!

Britain has a proud heritage of growing plants, and nowhere is this more accessible to gardeners than in our nations nurseries. From the tiniest specialist nurseries up to vast nurseries producing tens of thousands of plants each year, up and down the country there are a lot of people growing a wonderful range of plants for gardeners. 

The tradition of growing in the UK is well worth celebrating and supporting, and yet nurseries have been finding times hard in recent years, with a combination of bad weather, increasing costs and cheap foreign imports making it harder to keep the tradition of growing alive.

It's time to reverse the decline and work hard to support and save UK horticulture. It's well worth saving, not least of all because it ensures that you have access to healthy plants that are suitable for our nation's climate. By raising and growing plants in the UK we can also help protect our gardens from pests and diseases that are transported from overseas, as well as helping the environment by reducing the carbon footprint of each plant in our garden. But what is actually involved in growing and selling plants here in the UK? Well let me take you on a brief tour...

Stock plants at Seiont Nursery...

... and at Hardy's Plants

Much as with propagating at home, the key to success when raising new plants is to start with the best material. Skilled growers and propagators nurse stock or 'mother' plants to yield the highest number of healthy cuttings, which are then struck in carefully monitored and regulated conditions. Woody plants that cannot be raised from cuttings are often grafted onto a rootstock (many varieties of trees are done this way, and you can often see the graft 'union' at the bottom of the trunk)- grafting, essentially 'sticking' part of the plant you want to grow onto a compatible rootstock, sounds easy it's actually quite fiddly, and I'll admit my own efforts have failed spectacularly!

Plants raised from cuttings at Hardy's Plants

Preparing plants for tissue culture at Seiont

Spireas grown from cuttings at Walberton Nursery

Some herbaceous plants simply cannot be raised in sufficient numbers to satisfy demand, so must be raised by tissue culture in sterile conditions. Tissue culture is an incredible process; essentially you are making whole new plants from a cluster of cells from the original plant! Even though I've been growing plants that have been raised from tissue culture for years it still feels like a miracle! Although even the very idea of growing plants from clusters of cells sounds like something from science fiction it is an incredibly efficient way to raise large numbers of plants that are exactly the same variety in a sensible time frame and without incurring massive costs. However it is not economically viable to raise small numbers of plants this way, so many plants are still raised the traditional (and slow) way.

Heuchera plugs being weaned and hardened off at Seiont

Regardless of how plants are propagated they are very vulnerable in their first few weeks/months and skilled nursery staff must be vigilant to protect young plants from pests and diseases, fluctuations in watering, as well as cold or hot conditions. If you're propagating plants at home on a windowsill or in a greenhouse you have to 'harden them off', that is to say gently acclimatise them to outdoor conditions, and the same is true on commercial nurseries... albeit on a much larger scale!

For some nurseries this is the end of the road; for a young plant nursery their work is done when the plants are ready to send out, either as plugs or 9cm pots (or sometimes bigger if the plant warrants it) or bare rooted saplings for forestry. For these nurseries the scale of production is vast, and batches of plants could easily be 10,000 or more of each thing! Once plants are safe to send they are then send out to growing-on nurseries, the next stage in the plant's journey. Small nurseries and some larger nurseries only grow the plants that they propagate themselves, so the young plants are only transported around the same site- great for reducing the carbon footprint of each plant providing the nursery has the necessary stock plants and facilities to propagate the plants they want to stock.

Plants waiting to be sold at Hardy's Nursery

A growing-on nursery will receive the young plants and pot them up to be grown on for sale, either direct to the public or to garden centres. Plants are fed/watered, trained, pruned and generally cared for to get them to a size and quality that customers will like. Some crops have a very fast turnaround and might be ready for sale in a matter of a few weeks, while others might take a year or more to reach saleable size and standard. Across the UK armies of skilled nursery staff tend a wide range of crops to get them ready for your garden. Many nurseries grow only hardy plants, which means that their entire stock is very much suited to our climate, but others specialise in more exotic plants which may need completely different care regimes from hardy plants.

Lovely plants ready for sale at Hardy's Nursery

Once the plants are properly rooted and are ready they are put out for sale. On smaller traditional nurseries this might only be a very short distance from where they have been propagated and grown, but for wholesalers the plants must be sold on to garden centres. This is where locally sourced plants become important; if you live in the very north of Scotland your climate will be very different from the south coast of England, so plants sent straight up the length of the UK won't necessarily be safe to put straight into your garden, whereas plants grown by a nursery 10 miles away would be much better acclimatised to your conditions. Likewise plants raised under glass in Holland and imported to the UK need time to acclimatise to being outside.

There are many reasons why we should all support British nurseries, and here are a few:

Often the range of plants is better/more diverse in nurseries than garden centres, which is especially important if you want to grow something a little bit different and special in your garden.

By going to the growers you can usually be assured of more in-depth advice.

You are supporting your local and national economy.

You are less likely to introduce exotic pests and diseases into your own garden (I'll add at this point that I once found locusts on imported bedding plants in a garden centre- the staff were incredibly embarrassed!).

You are supporting a rich heritage of plant production here in the UK. If you want to enjoy UK grown plants in the future then nurseries must remain economically viable.

Beautiful Spireas leaving Walberton Nursery

Garden centres aren't bad, and in fact have their own part to play in British horticulture (increasingly buy their plants from British wholesalers), but to keep Britain's gardens as diverse as their owners we simply must support our nursery industry.

Images have kindly been donated by Swine's Meadow Farm Nursery (http://www.swinesmeadowfarmnursery.co.uk/), Hardy's Plants (http://www.hardys-plants.co.uk/) and Seiont (a trade nursery specialising in exciting new introductions, many of which are propagated by tissue culture). Likewise thanks also to Walberton Nursery (also a trade nursery) for the pictures of their Spirea production. Many thanks to all of you for your help with this blog post!