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?

June 25, 2011