Plants for Places

People often wonder exactly what there is for us to do in the plant centre at this time of year. The hectic Christmas season is now a distant memory and the spring rush is still several weeks away. Far from being a time to find a cosy little corner to hibernate in (although somedays its very very tempting!) January is the time when we tend to clear the decks, make a few changes and start afresh.

One of the areas we've been concentrating our efforts on over the last week is what we call the "Plants for Places" area. This is where most of our shrubs, climbing plants and perennials live but instead of arranging them in a meaningless alphabetical system like just about all the other garden centres do, we've developed a much easier way for customers to find their plants. Having identified the most common places in the garden that gardeners want to find plants for, we display our plants to give you solutions for each one. For instance if you want a climber for a north or east facing wall, our "Plants for Shady Walls" benches are the place to go!

As our plant stocks are relatively low at this time of year, we use this opportunity to clear the benches down and carry out any major display changes. This has given us the chance to tweak our themes a little bit, expanding the more popular ones and changing the less popular. Last year had several customers asking for large, fast growing shrubs so they could create a screen so today we've created a new plant collection for that.

Springtime is by far the peak selling time for shrubs so we obviously make sure we get stocked up in time. We always make sure we've got as many fresh plants as possible, ether from crops we've grown ourselves or from other growers. Our policy is to source our produce locally whenever possible so our first choice grower who supplies the majority of our shrubs is based here in Norfolk.

This week saw the year's first (and one of the biggest) deliveries of shrubs so we can build our stocks in good time for the spring. As the weather is still very cold we only start off with the very hardiest of plants, mostly the deciduous ones, and as they've been grown outdoors on the grower's nursery they can take the cold in their stride.