Eleven acres, no roof.
The nursery is a north-north-east slope on limestone at 412 metres, which is a bad site for growing plants quickly and the right one for growing them hard.
Four stages, none of them warm.
A heated glasshouse buys about six weeks. We do not have one, so everything here is roughly six weeks behind a Dutch-grown plant of the same age and considerably tougher than it. That trade is the whole business.
Seed is sown in autumn and stood outside all winter. Most of what we grow needs a real cold period to germinate at all; a fridge is a substitute and the weather is free.
Seedlings and divisions go into the Dutch lights. The glass is shut against rain, never against cold — the vents stay open to about −6 °C.
Into open ground in the second spring, spaced wide. Wind here is constant, and a plant that grows up in it builds a stem that does not need staking later.
Lifted bare-root in dormancy, washed, graded, and sent within two days. We do not lift in a hard frost: a frozen root ball breaks instead of bending.
Lifting windows.
Bare-root stock only moves while the plant is asleep. Container-grown stock from the frames can go out later, which is why the grasses and the tender pair have spring windows instead.
Order any time. We hold the sheet and lift when the window opens.
Two of us.
There is no third person, which is why the list is sixteen plants long and not two hundred.
Grower. Twenty-two years, the last eighteen of them here. Decides what goes on the list and what comes off it.
Propagation and lifting. Sows everything, divides everything, and keeps the frame vents honest through February.
The reason we believe any of this.
Dryas octopetala grows wild on the limestone bank above the top field. It is an arctic–alpine, it is a relic of the last glaciation, and nobody plants it, waters it or protects it. It has been doing that on this hill for about eleven thousand years.
We sell it because it is the honest end of the list: a plant that wants the worst ground you have, and will be there long after the thing you bought for its flowers has gone. See the catalogue.