Louise's flower shop

High summer is undoubtedly a hiatus in the garden;  the mad rush of growth and flowers in spring and early summer are fading in the memory, the plants that delivered that early season glory are enjoying a quiet bit of r & r and concentrating on building reserves for next years display, and the late season flowerers are still coyly waiting in the wings.

But your borders don’t have to be lacklustre!    We’ve tried especially hard to keep the nursery looking fresh right through the summer this year, and it’s certainly possible to keep a good show of colour going through the season.

There are Chrysanthemums, Phlox, Penstemons, Dahlias, Coreopsis, Heleniums, Heliopsis, Echinaceas, and many others to fill the mid-summer hungry gap, and Louise has spent many a happy hour recently playing florist with them in our shade tunnel.

And it looks lovely doesn’t it? You don’t often get customers saying “Wow”, but we’ve genuinely had several do so in the last few weeks. And “it’s just like a garden!”. And if that inspires them to take some plants home for their gardens, so much the better!

SALE!!!

20% off all herbaceous plants during August (while stock lasts!)

’nuff said.

Not being a retailer – in the sense that all we sell is plants – we don’t do Christmas, and we don’t sell Christmas trees.   But we do sell trees at Christmas (or thereabouts).

In addition to selling container grown trees throughout the year, we also sell bare root trees during their season, roughly November to March, and this means that our first delivery usually arrives in December.  So while other garden retailers are marshalling acres of Norway Spruce and Nordman Fir to brighten the nations front rooms, we’re sorting our way through piles of all shapes and sizes of trees to brighten our customers gardens.

Not your usual Christmas trees

We love trees, and our tree department is easily our fastest growing (ha!) area.  We’ve  just completed this years “tree department expansion plan” and created another 80 or so stations to accomodate extra tree stock.

Buying bare-root is a very economical way to get trees into your garden.  Because they are field grown they are much cheaper to produce (because they need much less TLC than their pot grown cousins) and because they don’t have huge pots of soil or compost permanently attached, their transport costs are much lower.

Anybody who arrives at the nursery outside the bare root season and either can’t find a tree they like, or wants one that’s larger, or cheaper, goes into the bare root book, and are then contacted in the autumn to see if we can sort something for them from our bare root suppliers.   Orders are processed “live” between November – March, although we try to consolidate deliveries into sensible batch sizes so we can offer the very best prices.

We’re very happy to be working in what might otherwise be the “off” season  of course, but it must be good for gardeners too – there’s little else to do in the garden in mid-winter and planting a tree is a wonderful excuse to get out there and do something.

More tree aisles!

This unassuming collection of tanalised timber is about to increase our tree display capacity, so we can offer customers an even bigger tree browsing opportunity.   We currently have about 250 trees on our sales area;  this timber will be used to build an extra 2 aisles, which will allow us to add another 100 or so trees to our display.   We’ll use the opportunity to stock the more popular species in depth, and add some more choice and unusual varieities, so we hope we’ll have something to suit most requirements.

And what better way could there be for us to spend our time in National Tree Week (which runs from 25 November to December 6 – that’s a week and a half isn’t it?).

And as it happens, the first tree delivery of this planting season arrives tomorrow, so we’d better start building!

You wanna be a record breaker ?

Don’t blame us, it’s the BBC’s pun.

‘Tree Time’ is actually the hour between 11am and midday on December 5th, when the BBC are hoping to establish a world record by getting 1,000,000 trees planted in 60 minutes. The current world tree planting record is held by the Phillipines  where over half a million people planted 653,000 trees on 25 August 2006.

The BBC has recruited members of the Horticultural Trades Association to help promote the event, and distribute some of the tree seedlings that they have to give away to help hit the target.

We’re very happy to be playing our part in this, and have a limited number of free tree seedlings available for anyone who wants to contribute to the record attempt (and of course, to the environment!).

All you have to do is formally commit to planting a tree on the BBC breathing places website and then e-mail them a photo of you doing so (with the time and date correctly set on your camera – the boys at Guinness need hard evidence to verify the record!). Then watch the press to see if the record has been broken!

The free seedlings available are Hazel, Field Maple, Cherry, Rowan, Hawthorn, and Silver Birch, and around 12 – 18 inches tall. If you prefer to source your own tree(s), of whatever size, that can still be counted towards the record attempt.

The free seedlings are available now – first come first served, one seedling per family – so if you want to take part call in to the nursery as soon as you can.

Now sold and accepted here!

We’ve always sold our own Barlow Nurseries gift vouchers, but have had to turn away customers who wanted to spend their National vouchers here, and of course, have been unable to sell vouchers to customers who wanted to send them to people in other parts of the country.

But that’s all changed  – you can now spend your National Garden Gift Vouchers at Barlow Nurseries, and we can sell you vouchers to send to your friends and relatives around the country.   With around 2000 garden retailers in the scheme, nobody is ever far away from a spending opportunity!

And if you can’t get to the nursery, just give us a call on our order line (07742 367494) and we’ll take a credit / debit card payment, and mail the vouchers to you, or directly to your friends and relatives, in a seasonal greetings card!

It was just lawn, everywhere, although surprisingly large – one of those “could’ve got another house on here!” gardens.  The brief was to cut decent size borders (1 – 2mts deep) around the perimeter, and plant up with easy care shrubs.  About 100 square metres of turf to strip, and about 160 (mostly specimen size) plants and trees to install.

Did you order 165 shrubs sir ?

And everything just kind of happened – we were able to juggle our diary to free up the time to do the work, we planned and organised the plants at very short notice (less than a week) the weather was extraordinarily benign, Steve and Nick worked their socks off, and the customer has a garden!   Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together!?

There are still some finishing touches outstanding – bark mulch to be laid, and some bare root trees and hedges to be installed when that season starts in a few weeks time, but the job is largely done.   Alan Titchmarsh would have been proud!

The picture shows our new Ifor Williams trailer ready for its maiden voyage,  loaded up with the first batch of plants for this job, so its earning its keep already.   And no, we wouldn’t normally transport plants on an open top trailer – but the job was very local, along very slow country lanes, so just on this occasion….

It’s safe to say we started the year with absolutely no idea where we might go – the media was awash with doom and gloom about the economy, and horticulture was reeling from the effects of two years in which key sales periods had been, well, a bit wetter than we’d have liked.

We wanted 2009 to be better, but it wasn’t looking great.

Luckily, our spring weather this year was very nice, and while people certainly seemed to be cutting back on big ticket expenditure (holiday companies were advertising summer holidays on television in the summer, which rather implies they’d missed their targets by a country mile) but popping out to the garden centre to buy a few plants still seemed to be on the agenda, and sales were good.

Unluckily, some of our business is “big ticket” too, and we’ve seen a significant drop in border design and installation enquiries……until now.   We can only assume that this is down to the weather – September was remarkably mild and almost completely dry, and apart from a couple of wet days, October has so far been much the same.   People are still using their ‘outdoor rooms’, probably much later into the year than they’d expected,  and seem to be coming back to the idea of gardening on a sufficiently grand scale that they need our help with design and installation work.

Perhaps the economic gloom is lifting just a tad too, tho’ we’re not going to tempt fate by suggesting we may be climbing out of the mire just yet.   We’ll just content ourselves with the thought that right now, our biggest problem is getting all the work done before the weather breaks.

OK chaps, lights out, set your alarms for March 2010

But what days!   After a couple of hours potting up some of next years plants, the sun emerged from behind the clouds and the clothing layers started to peel off.   After another hour we decided we had to make the best of what is likely to be some of the last serious sunshine of the year, and get outside.

So the grand autumn tidy was resumed, and a few more batches of plants were weeded, top-dressed, gently pruned, and finally set out on the nursery beds where they’ll see out the winter.

And it was glorious – we love working outside of course, but I suspect even the most die-hard office junkie would struggle not to revel in autumn sunshine. There’s something very special about grabbing those last few rays of warmth before the sun heads properly south for the winter.   And there’s something special about seeing the stock you’ve carefully nurtured for months (or years!) being tucked up safe and sound for its winter hibernation.

Rain is forecast for tomorrow, but then a few more days of sunshine…bring it on!

Herbaceous kindergarten

Just as one season draws to a close, another looms on the horizon, and here we go again….

Although the late autumn season sees a resurgence in interest in evergreen shrubs and trees, it also sees the end of herbaceous plant sales – the plants themselves realise that it’s time to take a break, and retreat underground for a winter rest.    But while the older plants go on their subterranean sabatical, there’s a whole new generation limbering up in the wings just waiting for their chance to bloom.

No sooner does one season finish than another one gets under way.   Our picture shows a few of our next generation – some of the plants we’ll be selling next season.   If the volume of seed and young plant catalogues currently dropping onto our doormat is anything to go by, there must be gazillions of others lined up in other nurseries across the UK and continental Europe too.

The plants in the picture will have to grow a bit first of course, but that’s what we’re here for!   Little green things right now, but colour in your borders next year!