On Friday afternoon I loaded the van with some of my best looking plants, drove to Arley Hall just up the road and began setting up a small plant stall at Arley’s Garden Festival. It took two more round trips in my little van to deliver enough plants to fill the stand. Early on Saturday morning Dave and I put up a B&Q gazebo, set out two trestle tables from Costco, covered them in black fabric and I carefully set out my lovingly grown plants on and around them.
I fluffed out the leaves to let each plant show its individual beauty and rearranged them to make the colours look pleasing. I wrote out missing information labels with my personal description using my favourite silver pen on black angled labels and stood back admiringly at my small, but colourful little stall. The whole thing took quite a time, as you can imagine.
Late on Friday night, on the stand right behind me, a man pulled up in a 7.5 ton truck, lowered the tail-lift at the back and rolled off ten Danish trolleys. Each one was packed tight with perennials in 9cm pots, all tied up tightly to canes, wedged into trays. He laid the shelves from his trolleys onto upturned black crates on the grass and stood the plants in their trays on them, exactly as they came off the trolley. He erected a placard stating ‘3 plants for £10’ and drove off. Job done.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I was hacked off that I had taken such care to grow and present my plants and was now faced with an pile-’em high, flog ’em cheap costcutter and that I spent the day fuming at my ill-fortune. I’ll admit that was my first, fleeting thought.
But he was the talkative sort and decently offered to get me tea when he went for one. And I was curious about his lifestlye and business model, so he told me. And I learned a great deal.
He and his wife grow all their plants on their 5 acre nursery from seed or cuttings. There are just the two of them. He has a sand bed capillary watering system in his polytunnels to minimise water use and let plants take up water on demand. He doesn’t use overhead sprinklers as they spread disease more quickly and waste water. He swears by compost tea and proudly shows me his Monardas, impressively free of mildew. He has designed the whole nursery to minimise the need for human intervention, developing his methods over many years of experimentation.
He has standardised on one pot size to simplify everything from potting to labelling, van filling and display layouts. His wife is chief pricker-outer of seeds and can do 4000 a day if he fills the compost hopper often enough.
His nursery is in the South East – he sells at shows in Ireland and Scotland as well as all over England. He drives all over the country in his truck, sleeping in the cab to save hotel costs. Most weeks in the summer he does two shows a week. He pines for home and says he is permanently tired. I believe him, he looks knackered. Stand rentals of over £3,000 at Hampton Court means he must sell 1000 plants to cover that alone before the transport costs, overheads and of course, the cost of producing the plant in the first place.
He is snortingly derisive of self-styled specialist nurseries. ‘Look at my range’ he says, and I do, approvingly. ‘The only difference between me and the so-called specialists on Arley’s gravel drive is that they produce 20 of a plant and I produce 500’. ‘And for most of them its a second or hobby income. But this is my only livelihood – I can’t pay my bills if I don’t sell.’
He has a very good point. His plants are a bit etiolated from being so closely grown, but they are otherwise healthy, true to type and individually labelled. He knows his stock because he grew it himself and is proud of it all. He sells a lot of plants because he must and he can do so because he has invested in efficient production systems, has driven down his cost of production and works extremely hard.
I wandered into the gravelled drive area after the show had closed. One ‘specialist’ nursery with a cute hand painted sign had some weedy looking Anthemis ‘Sauce Hollandaise’ at £5.00 and some 1 litre Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’ at £6.00. That’s not specialism, that’s taking the proverbial.
I came away thinking I had much to learn from him. I don’t want to be a factory producer of plants, but there are costs from inefficiency and underinvestment that can be driven out, and the savings turned into reduced prices for customers and increased profits for the nursery. And there is no shame in that at all.
ADDENDUM:
He told me today that he had a row with another stallholder at a plant fair last year and has been banned from returning. His side of the story is that the other person was loudly telling all his customers that his very cheap plants were grown for love, not money, that growing plants was his hobby and he had a ‘proper’ job during the week. My chap took him to task, pointing out that he was undercutting him unfairly and talking down HIS proper job, by suggesting than running a nursery was just a hobby occupation. It turned into a row, apparently, and he got banned.
I can see why he got annoyed. Imagine a new hairdresser opened up, doing weekend haircuts for £5.00 because they just loved cutting hair and had a ‘proper job’ during the week which paid the bills? It wouldn’t do, would it?
13 Responses to “Sacred cows…..”
interesting and thought provoking… as you point out every business needs to examine its production costs and streamline activities to minimise costs & overheads.
so the guy has decided to standardise so many activities to allow him to sell competitively and in volume. so bringing more plants into the gardens of his customers too.
sure he works very hard and probably gets by, and if most of his sales come via the plant fairs then his revenue streams will be skewed during the year..
i cant decide whether he should be applauded and congratulated or not.. either way you have to admire him for his work ethic alone
That certainly chimes with me – When I was trying to make my living as a textile artist, I found it very hard when people who had a "proper job" and did textiles for "fun" sold things for less than the material costs making me look "off the planet" expensive although, I was in fact working for less than the minimum wage.
That sort of thing gets me very riled and I can totally understand your neighbouring stall holders point of view.
One thing I was wondering – does he get rid of all his plants that outgrow the 9cm pots at the end of the selling year, as more cost effective than potting them on?
K
Well, Sue, I appreciated your own efforts, and I'm very happy with my Brunnera (thank you for removing the slug!) I recognised you but was too much in awe, etc… but will look out for your stall at the next event, purely based on the "quality of your product"… I didn't get the grass v gravel divide at all, apart from the Arley nursery and the herb/veg guy stuck away in the corner, everything else wasn't that great: the quality stuff was on the grass, certainly I felt, yourself included. Steve, Liverpool.
This is a fascinating question and one probably without an answer. You pays your money and you takes your choice. I think what you do should earn you a living. It's the same with food producers. Most of the world gets excited about how cheaply they can buy things and supermarkets take over and that undoubtedly drives down standards. Personally I don't want a corporate approach. I have spent too many years working with corporates and know the power of "bottom line" thinking to drive out variety and passion. I also don't want horticulture which can only survive off hobbyists. Be professional in what you do, be prepared as a customer to pay a proper price. Sounds easy, seems to be unfeasibly difficult. If anyone can get it right, seems to me it might be you and Dave.
Your Brunnera will be wonderful, Steve – and don't be shy about saying hi properly next time. I'm quite friendly really!
My approach at Arley is to take plants that I donn't think others will have, like the Brunnera, Sanguisorba obtusa and Hemerocallis 'Corky', which all sold well. And I do treat it as a PR exercise as well, which it is, given that I'm only 15 minutes away.
But on principle I price the plants that same as at the nursery – it would be quite unfair on my nursery customers to suddenly flog stock off more cheaply at Arley because of cheek-by-jowl competition.
Karen – I asked him – he usually divides them to create more stock, or bins them by exception. But mostly he said he expects to sell them all.
Saleable plants in 9cm pots-I can just see 'em. That's what we prick out into. Somehow I doubt they'd be very happy planted out into our weald clay in a dry spring.Any way, good luck to him, though its not the way for us (I hope!)
I do believe we came across him at Burton Agnes Plant Fair. His plants were fine, although I did not buy any as I was replacing winter losses and he had none of the plants I wanted. My only other purchase was a Campanula argea from the National Collection – I am almost certain he would not stock this. Very thought provoking Sue, worth taking on board some of his ideas.
Hello Brian – a very long time no see! You would not believe how much this place has changed since you were last here. Should you find yourself with an excuse to visit Cheshire, please drop in. Don't suppose you're going to Tatton Show?
Have no fear Sue, should we be in the viscinity in a car there would be no way we would not drop in! I have followed your changes with interest and it would be great to see it again in the flesh. No we are not going to Tatton, but we will be going to Shrewsbury as we are on a coach trip (snowy tops anonymous). I hope you are there and we get to say hello?
Hi Sue, there's a bit of a peat v peat-free debate in the Guardian today (8/7/11). No doubt you're very busy pre-Tatton though. I'll be there on the Saturday. Will say hello this time! You have my best wishes. Steve, Liverpool.
I think I know the grower that you met and he is a good chap – always generous with the teas and genuinely grateful if you stand him cuppa in return (or, even better, a bacon buttie). He and his wife work very hard (and have done for many years) and grow plants that are of generally good quality.
I spent 15 years doing the plant fair circuit in the south east. Ours was a proper nursery business, just like his – there was no "day job". Nothing infuriated me more than when I saw poorly grown plants at silly prices like the Anthemis you describe.
Sadly, in this country, horticulture is not taken seriously as a career/profession. In my work now, I spend a lot of time travelling on the continent. when you see the Dutch, Germans and Poles, in particular, training young people to a high standard for our industry, paying fair salaries and projecting an image of a professional industry, you wonder how some parts of British horticulture survive.
There is room for the specialist. As you say, there are many plants which sell in modest numbers only – not the hundreds or thousands, but the tens or dozens each year. This is a good place for the specialist and, with online ordering and mail order, there's a good business to be made there.
Selling '3 for £10' devalues the product, I have been a 'hobby' nurseryman for 15+ years however my plants will normally be priced with some of the highest prices at a fair, partly like yourself I sell what I like to think are the more unusual (mainly difficult to propagate) taller (don't fit easily on a Danish trolley) or relatively new perennials, but I am concerned not to compete on price, but on quality, or desirability, with my Nursery competitors. When you see Garden Centres selling plants for £7.99 for common stuff, why does he knock out plants albeit in 9cm pots so cheaply? It explains why he finds it so hard to make a living. Plants are sold too cheaply all round, it gives no regard to the skill, knowledge, seasonality, experience and hard work that goes into growing them, but based on the perception of what people are prepared to pay. If we don't value our skill why should the public?