As one generation of small specialist plant nursery owners retires, who are their successors, and what challenges do they face? Juliet Sargeant finds out
A ripple of sad resignation spread through Sussex when Paul and Pauline McBride, who represent a generation of small nursery owners, announced that they would be hanging up their trowels and closing the garden gate at Sussex Prairie Garden in 2025.
I live near the nursery and for a decade I have benefitted, professionally and personally, from its plant supplies, use of the garden, and the horticultural expertise of the McBrides.
Naturally, I wanted to find out more so I went to talk to them, to hear their reflections on what, Pauline tells me, has been an accidental life in horticulture.
Having met in Europe, while working in the gardens created and maintained by The War Graves Commission, the couple in 1998 set up their own business and began by developing a new garden for a private client of the then less well-known Piet Oudolf. Together, the McBrides honed their knowledge of grasses and ‘new perennials’ before returning to Britain in 2008, to an eight-acre fallow field which, in their hands, quickly (the garden opened to the public in 2009) found fame as Sussex Prairie Garden.
Soon after opening, the couple began selling plants and offering teas and with a far-flung reputation bringing in regular coachloads of visitors, their business stabilised as 30 per cent garden entry fees, 30 per cent plant sales, and 30 per cent refreshments.
During the period of COVID-19, visitors from the locality were delighted to be able to visit the Sussex Prairie Garden but the coach numbers reduced and since the lifting of the national lockdowns, they have remained down.
Paul sees that some growers may have diversified more, offered a mail order service, or mechanised, but the McBrides’ offering has always been proudly ‘home-spun’.
Pauline’s family has farmed the land since 1949 and the garden surrounds the couple’s home. Pauline’s colourful needlecrafts adorn the walls of the barns, sculptures peep through the plants in the garden and Paul is always on hand to identify plants and offer advice.
It was a recipe that worked for so long but in the absence of a new owner to take up the reigns, the now 32-acre farm is being allowed to revert to its original state, as a natural environment. Florists and the public will be able to buy cut flowers and foliage that have grown and been foraged from the site, and the rural location, including its Dutch barn house and steel viewing tower, is also being offered as a film location.
Family business
Further north, in Worcestershire, Ed Boers is a third-generation Dutch grower whose family set up Gardeners’ Kitchen in the county some 40 years ago, growing salad plants for retail on a commercial scale. Ed remembers growing up on the family farm, learning by doing and watching his father’s keen interest in process and efficiency.
COVID-19, however, was a catalyst for change for Ed and his wife, Laura Whiley. In 2023, they decided to start their own business. At the same time, Hazel and Dick Key were closing the doors of their own family business, the much-loved specialist nursery Fibrex which, with the help of their children, they were running in the Warwickshire countryside.
The 64-year-old Fibrex was a brand upon which Ed and Laura felt they could build their own vision of a medium-sized producer, focusing particularly on popular pelargoniums.
Ed, like most small-to-medium-enterprise nurserymen, is a grower at heart and he is fortunate that Laura’s skills lie in programme management, social media, and the Internet-side of things; a great team to take the business into an uncertain future.
Two years since the couple became the new owners, however, Ed has concluded their business now has to be about more than just growing the plants. It takes time for plants to grow and ‘Time is expensive,’ he says.
Consequently, the couple is constantly assessing opportunities to diversify whilst at the same time learning to say ‘No’ to offers that do not help them to build the business. Ed wants to speed up processes so they can increase the volume of plants grown, and to sell at scale to specialist garden centres.
He recognises the challenges of labour costs, regulation, and going peat-free that are cited by many, but he and Laura are optimistic. They think there is a position in the British market for Fibrex and they intend to do justice to the respected brand that has been passed to them.
It is this passion that underpins the British network of small nursery growers as a whole. They are the ‘shopkeepers’ of Britain’s 300 to 400 plant and tree nursery companies. Of the £1.7 billion spent by consumers each year on outdoor plants, 15 per cent of that is via mail order or the Internet, and five per cent is ‘elsewhere’. I imagine that that latter figure includes expenditure by visitors to the Plant Fairs Roadshow (PFR), which is currently co-ordinated by Paul Seaborne, of Pelham Plants. The PFR is a non-profit co-operative of about 40 small, eclectic nurseries, which runs regular, affordable, straight-to-consumer sales events in gardens such as those of Hever Castle, Hole Park and, for the first time in 2026, Inner Temple in London.
THERE APPEARS TO BE A THRIVING COMMUNITY OF SMALL GROWERS AND SOME VERY PROFITABLE LARGE NURSERIES, BUT A STRUGGLING MIDDLE GROUND.
Land pressures
I asked Paul Seaborne if he thinks that recent nursery closures1 are natural churn, or whether there is something else going on? Surprisingly, he talks about land.
Paul, like many, fell into growing when he started cultivating a few of his favourite plants in his own garden; the barriers to entry into plant production are low – anyone with green fingers and a garden can get started. And this is where most people stay, building their expertise, specialising their offering, and making a good life.
Small nurseries can provide the added value that side-steps the consumer’s sensitivity to price rises. Research shows that consumers care about plant quality, biosecurity and environmental impact2. They value the pleasant shopping experience and the opportunity for information that comes from a personal encounter with the grower.
It is the barriers to expansion that Paul sees as creating a squeeze on middle-sized nurseries. Land prices are unaffordable for new business owners, space is at a premium, infrastructure is costly, and because there is a minimum scale for profitability, expanding just a little bit is not viable.
To Paul, there appears to be a thriving community of small growers and some very profitable large nurseries, but a struggling middle ground. Will this latter group be aided, I wonder, by the newly formed Nursery Exhibitors Organisation, set up in February this year to promote and support all specialist growers in Britain? I do hope so.
The sands are shifting, but as for my original concern, I am happy to say ‘Enjoy retirement’ to a generation of specialist growers. I am reassured by the knowledge that there is a vibrant new wave of nurserymen with an eye on the future and an appreciation of the traditions that have gone before them.
USEFUL RESOURCES