Rebuilding a nursery - Copton Ash

[François Lambert]

Very interesting Tim. It shows us just how much work is involved in running a small nursery. I'm pretty sure I couldn't be organised enough to cope with it.

Indeed, so little time for so much work.  I grow summer flowering bulbs (most of them in pots), so spring is the time for dividing the clumbs of bulbs, repotting them, sowing new bulbs, moving pots from their winter storage in the cellar back outside - and combining that with a full time day job and a vegetable garden that's also crying for attention.  I'm not running a nursery, but it's also now in spring that i occasionally go to a plant fair to sell my excess bulbs as I did on Easter Monday.  Luckilly, I am the only one selling such bulbs, so i'm a bit sheltered from competition from similar products, but at the same time I think nobody of my customers imagined to buy an Eucomis or Tigridia bulb when going to the plant fair, so basically this is all kind of unplanned impulsive buying.  Having great pictures of the flowers really helps to improve sales - in fact an absolute necessity for bulbs.  I did not have a very exhilarating picture for one of my species and only sold a few of these, where those with better pictures were sold out or nearly sold out.

[Tim Ingram]

Yes Francosi, this is the great difficulty of growing and selling more unusual plants - there are few people who really know of them and pictures or plants in flower are what really command attention. It surprises me though that more gardeners are not more inquisitive - many will buy quite comprehensive books on plants, very well illustrated, but not actually discover the plants through a more adventurous approach to growing them. And alpines are famous for putting people off because few take the trouble to really experiment with growing conditions.

(David - it may be difficult to run a small nursery, but it was even harder when it was rather larger! Like a farmer said on the box last night you only do this because it's in your blood and there is good sense in growing things).

[David Lyttle]

Hi Tim,

Nice to see you are growing Sophora tetraptera. Is it regarded a tender in Britain? I have several Sophora species here but not S. tetraptera. The local one is S. microphylla, a really graceful elegant tree but it take 10-15 years to mature and flower so it is not so popular with garden centres. Kowhais are great trees for attracting nectar feeding birds which you do not have in Britain. Your Corokia cotoneaster is flowering more freely than it generally does in the wild. If you can get it Corokia macrocarpa from the Chatham Islands is well worth growing

[Tim Ingram]

Hi David - the prevailing wisdom (Bean) is that Sophora tetraptera is generally hardy against a sunny wall over much of the UK; in Ireland it makes a sizeable tree, though even ours is 12 or 15 feet high and still relatively young! It is a beautiful and amazingly free-flowering plant. I didn't realise that S. microphylla had a long juvenile phase, but we also grow the small cultivar (not sure of its origins?) 'Little Baby' and this flowers well. The whole genus is fascinating - the Chinese S. davidii especially so - and there are a number of N. American species which I could wish were hardy with us but need hotter climes.

The Corokia doesn't always flower so freely and we only have one plant and never get berries - but I think Graham Hutchins used to grow a wider variety and they sound quite striking in fruit as well as flowering. C. cotoneaster is imperturbably hardy with us but we have lost C. virgata and a couple of the more recent foliage variations in cold winters. C. macrocarpa is new to me but I see it is listed by Great Dixter not far from us so we should give it a try!

[Yann]

Yesterday a friend of mine and i visited Tim's nursery. The garden has a wonderful collection of plants and trees.





We brought home plants in perfect health and well sized, somes are already planted in the rockery.

We had a great time with Tim and Gillian

[Maggi Young]

Lucky you, Yann - you even got a sunny day to enjoy the visit. 

[Yann]

Yes the weather was perfect!!

I'll have to go in the Vercors to shot Ophrys but the weather is very wet. I found the heat in England 

[Tim Ingram]

Really nice to see those pictures from Yann. At the moment we are continuing to clear the undergrowth in a very overgrown part of the garden to expand the nursery area as we propagate more and more plants. There is the element of 'painting the Forth Bridge' about it, but bit by bit progress is being made.

Here is another view of the alpine house at Godinton Place (that I mentioned in another thread) and which I would like to beam into the garden when we have made space! This mostly has auriculas and succulents growing within it, but nothing like those I will show below...

[Yann]

The small greenhouses of Godinton have a very special roof vents system, still in function.

[Tim Ingram]

Last Saturday we joined the 'Plants Roadshow' at Telegraph Hill, just off the A2 halfway into London. This event was organised by a group of Kentish nurseries, and in particular by Fiona Wemyss (Blueleaf Plants), who used to live locally in the area. Because she grows such great plants I thought I would just show a selection. The tall Euphorbia trigona in the square metal pot I thought was rather brilliant and my wife didn't like at all (so great minds don't necessarily think alike). Anyway it now sits on our windowsill with a couple of ancient cacti which must be over 40 years old. I think these plants are beautifully and imaginatively presented, and they do compare in the former (but not always the latter) with the way many alpine plants are often grown.

[Tim Ingram]

This was a small plant sale - you could say with a big heart - held in a community hall, and was quite a social occasion for the locals, even if not a brilliant selling venue for the nurseries. It was organised as part of the Chelsea Fringe but you could say was well beyond the 'Fringe' in not such a up market part of the City. A nice day, but we did bring back almost as many plants as we took, so a bit of rethinking might be needed.

[Tim Ingram]

A few final pictures...

[Tim Ingram]

Just looked through the pictures of Chris Johnson's new alpine house at Ardivacher and I've changed my mind - this is what I would like for Christmas! That height and open situation should be great for so many plants. We are visiting Adrian Cooper later in the week, who lives just south of Maidstone and has a similar purpose built alpine house, high up overlooking the Weald of Kent, in which alpines are planted out - will show some pictures later on.

[Tim Ingram]

The generosity of alpine gardeners. A couple of examples of plants we have been given: first a picture of one side of David Hoare's saxifrage house; David has kindly given us some large specimens of saxes no longer any good for showing, for cuttings, plus a nice selection of 'silvers' - it will be good to increase the range of these that we propagate, and the latter are especially suitable for our drier garden where not everything gets the attention it might deserve; and second, two pots of Eucomis vandermerwei - the one on the left a group of seedlings from Darren Sleep which have very bold spotting, and on the right the commercial strain 'Octopus'. These are always so late to appear but it will be very interesting to see how they differ in flower too. (A few nice things that came from Lesley in NZ are also growing well - thanks to all!).

[Tim Ingram]

And a small part of the nursery area filling with plants (the silver foliage is an excellent form of Centaurea cineraria - perhaps similar to 'Colchester White' that Ramparts Nursery sold many years ago), and the next area that needs clearing!