We’re at the darkest time of the year with the winter solstice upon us. I find myself watching gardening videos and window shopping for plants anticipating longer days ahead.
So I thought it was the perfect time to pull together a list of independent UK seed producers and plant nurseries I’ve been looking at recently.
(This is a quick and dirty post in that I’m typing into WordPress rather than a textfile. So beware of resulting spelling and grammar mistakes.)
If anyone has any recommendations on a similar theme feel free to drop me a link.
Looking at seeds online gives me the same kick as sitting with the Argos catalogue as a kid flicking through the pages of toys and gadgets. I’m forever window shopping but mainly stick to seed saving and swapping (which is a joyful thing to do in its own right). I’m still drawing up a plan for next years planting which I’ll post sometime late winter.
Real Seeds is my favourite, mainly because they champion open seed licenses, open seed libraries and seed saving. Based near Newport, Real Seeds trial varieties in the local climate to see which crops work well locally. For exmple this year I grew an early flowering variety of grain amaranth from them which they cultivated to grow well with our shorter season in the UK. They have lots of information about heritage / heirloom varieties, including their relevance to social histories or who made the effort to preserve them for future generations. I bought Sutherland Kale seeds from them, which are a variety of kale grown by crofters in the Highlands. Seeds like this mean you can grow your own piece of social history right in your garden. I have handmedown plants from relatives and family friends, the value of plants can be as much in their social history as their ability to feed us.
All of their seed comes with instructions on how to save seeds from the resulting crops for future years. Real Seeds also have openly licensed resources to help small seed producers, including: ‘DIY Seed Cleaner Plans’ and ‘Scoops for Packing Seeds’.
Incredible Vegetables is a perenial vegetable nursery in Devon. They experiment with collecting perenial vegetables from around the world and seeing which are viable for the UK climate. Devon is in the southwest of England so they have a much milder climate than many of us, but the nursery’s plant descriptions detail how hardy the plants are (many down to -10C) and what winter protections are needed if any. They sell seeds, dormant 1L potted plants, tubers, bulbs and cuttings. I’ve bought a small number of plants from them to plant out for spring which I’m excited about.
Alma Proust is a flower farm, seed producer and floral design studio in Sussex. Their varieties are open pollenated so year to year they get different colours and variations. I haven’t bought from them but I’ve enjoyed window shopping. I really loved this recent interview with them which is how I found them. Their farm is very beautiful so even if you’re not bothered about growing cut flowers go and eyeball their setup.
Potato House… you guessed it, sell potatoes. They’re based in Dundee and have over a hundred seed potato varieties including blight resistant varieties and heritage varieties. I was struggling to find somewhere that sold Christmas seed potatoes (earlies cold stored for late summer planting for late autumn cropping) and Potato House was a common online suggestion. I bought a small amount from here to have a go this year with moderate success (the weather was overly wet for it and the leaves ended up with blight but the potatoes were fine if slightly small).
They stock Sarpo varieties, a type which have been bred to be reliably blight resistant while giving a good crop. As the UK climate gets wetter blight resistant varieties are going to become increasingly important.
Wales Seed Hub is a collective of individual growers across Wales that collect openly pollinated seed from heritage variteties that grow well in the local climate. I’ve seen Huw Richards talk about them before, and his love of their Llanover Pea variety which “create peas almost the size of field beans, they’re huge and retain their sweetness even when they go over a bit”. I haven’t bought from the Wales Seed Hub before but if I want to try new varieties at some point I’ll definetly look here.
Keepers Nursery is a fruit tree nursery in Kent. They boast the UK’s largest range of fruit trees with over 1200 different fruit tree varieties. Their website is super helpful with function over fluff. You can filter trees by root stock, pollination group, growth habit etc. Each variety then has listed under their characteristics a link to show a list of their pollenation partners (which was really helpful when I was comparing pear varieties). They largely sell maiden trees but they have a small range of fan trained and other forms of tree. They take requests on grafting if you want to pair a specific root stock with a particular variety. And of course the site has lots of lovely pictures of unusual varieties of apples, pears and more with info including parentage and origin. I’ve ordered two maiden pear trees which I’m expecting delivery of in February 2025.
Sidenote: While writing this I found their youtube channel where most videos have thumbnails of the owner posing with different apple varieties. I’ve saved this video on chip bud grafting to come back to later.
Tomato Revolution based in Wiltshire exclusively sells seed for a wide range of tomato varities. They’ve been recommended to me a few times by friends and friends of friends but I haven’t taken the plunge yet (I keep using saved seed from 10 or so heritage / heirloom varieties).
For a long time it was hard to get unusual tomato varieties in the UK, I guess from a mixture of import rules and with our climate limiting the season length and increasing blight risk. Here you can find all sorts of varieties that Tomato Revolution have been able to reliably grow in the UK. For each variety they include information on plant growth habit, if they can be grown outside, the parentage of the seed, and the size and flavour characteristics of the fruit.
Ryton Gardens and the Heritage Seed Library is right near me with a Coventry postcode. They are home to the Heritage Seed Library, the national archive of heritage / heirloom vegetable seeds. Each year they make 150 varieties available to HSL members. When I was a kid I visited with family every year or so as they had a garden open to the public as well as a farm shop and events. At some point they closed to the public and I haven’t visited since my late teens (the last time I went I tried some fancy small batch vodka so that’s my bench mark!). But I thought of them the other day so checked out their website and they seem to host regular workshops so I’ll need to find a way back there in 2025.
Hardy’s Plants is a cottage garden plant nursery in Hampshire. They’ve won 24 RHS gold awards at Chelsea for their garden displays and they’re a great collector and champion of perenials. I mainly wanted to include them to recommend Rosy Hardy’s youtube channel which I really enjoy. She provides season specific advice as well as answering all sorts of gardening questions. Rosy is very open about how she runs the nursery, explaining how they take cuttings and grow them on, the way that the nursery is structured to accomoate different types of perenials, and many other considerations. I knew nothing about cultivated flowers when I started allotment gardening and now that I’ve built a basic knowledge set Rosy’s videos help me learn more in depth knowledge of perenials and their care.
The Hardy Geranium Nursery is based in Surrey and (you guessed it) specialise in true geraniums. (I still don’t get where geraniums as a common name for pelargoniums comes from when true geraniums are geraniums. We gotta noramlise geraniums as geraniums rather than this hardy and true qualifier shenanigans.) I’m a fan of geraniums and love spotting different ones out and about, whether cultivated or self-seeded sticking out of hedges and meadows. I haven’t bought from this nursery but I’ve loved looking through their collection.
Avondale Nursery is somewhere local I discovered this year, they’re based at Bagington on the edge of Coventry. They are National Collection Holders for three plant families, Symphyotrichum (Aster) novae-angliae, Anemone nemorosa and Sanguisorba. They have a Library Garden which displays their collections even when some are not available for sale. I went late season and bought a reduced geranium and a small selection of tall asters as pollinator-friendly perenials to extend the flowering season at the plot.
