Our Business
Better Planting Plants is an opportunity to buy online from the wide range of herbaceous plants grown in our nursery.
Better Planting Design is a new specialised garden design aspect to a pre-existing nursery business, offering to help anyone who wants to plant any area, from tiniest urban courtyard to large tracts of countryside, with the most suitable choice of species.
Our Plants
We produce mostly herbaceous plants of extremely diverse character, enabling the creation of landscapes and gardens fulfilling the widest objectives of utility and beauty.
The plants listed are all available here because they have over a lifetime of our experience proved fairly easy to grow in quite varied conditions. In general, we only retain plants that are not susceptible to diseases so do not require spraying, that have vigorous growth, can stand upright on their own stems without the need for staking, that except in few cases are hardy and will survive the winter outside in most of the UK without protection.
We have come to trust and appreciate less highly bred varieties or actual wild species including British natives. The large flowered cultivars exemplified particularly in genera such as Dahlia and Chrysanthemum often have disproportionately big blooms for the plant’s balance as a whole and do not combine well with our more ‘wild varieties’ so are usually excluded. Many even classic herbaceous border plants such as delphiniums and lupins, except for a few occasionally raised varieties and species are not represented here as we have found them too hard to grow in our soils under a low maintenance largely organic regime. In the time required to adequately stake and protect a single individual such plant from pests, half a dozen easier, less spectacular, but arguably equally if more modestly appealing subjects could be chosen. Gardening is undergoing a revolution, to be sometimes more natural in terms of design and materials used and in its cultivation practices to be more harmonized with the natural world. Our nursery is at the heart of these new approaches.
While following our own guidelines in the main, we are confessedly not always consistent in sticking to them. Some tender plants that look well with our generally hardy ones are too good to leave out. Others of exceptional form, length of flowering period, or those with coloured foliage that might not be considered to fit a ‘natural’ image are included or actually focused on for their invaluable potential contribution to many garden pictures.