Grown cold
on purpose.
Every plant we sell has spent its whole life outdoors at 412 metres. Nothing here has ever been under heat, so nothing here has to be hardened off after it reaches you.
A plant raised warm has to learn your winter. Ours already knows it.
Most perennials reach a garden centre from a heated Dutch glasshouse in February, in leaf, six weeks ahead of the season. They look better than ours on the bench. They are also the ones that go through a hard February and do not come back, and by then nobody connects the two.
First-winter losses reported back to us by customers on field-grown stock, across the last four seasons.
Losses on the forced stock we used to buy in to fill gaps. We stopped reselling it in 2019 and the figure above is why.
Describe your worst corner. We will tell you what dies in it.
Four things decide whether a perennial lives: how cold the ground actually gets, which way it faces, how wet it stays, and what the soil is. Set them as they really are — not as you would like them — and the whole stock list sorts itself against your site.
Will thrive
Will survive
Will die here
Eleven acres, no roof.
Stock stands in open ground and in unheated Dutch lights that are shut against rain, never against cold. We lift bare-root between November and March, which is when the plant is asleep and does not notice, and we do not lift at all in a hard frost because a frozen root ball breaks rather than bends.
The ground here grows Dryas octopetala wild on the limestone above the top field. If it lives on that bank without us, it will live in your garden.
Sixteen plants, all of them field-hardened.
We grow a short list properly rather than a long one badly. Every entry carries its RHS hardiness rating, its real height and spread, and the conditions it will actually take — the same data the gate above reads.