Nurseries - Was: Re New Books
Mike, Moira -
Many thanks for the grand weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth! I
didn't intend (honest!) to set off such a chorus of lamentation!
I don't think the overall situation (yet) is as desperate in the UK as
you make it sound in the US and NZ. Indeed, it isn't. If The Plant
Finder can list 70, 000+ different plants, it really can't be, even
allowing for the inclusion of hundreds of HT roses, this year's fancy
bedding pelargoniums, etc etc.
There is indeed a serious reduction in the number of nurseries
offering mail order and that is a worry. There is also a worrying
number of very high-quality long-established specialists going out of
business (Hannays of Bath, the Evanses of Waterwheel Nursery, for
example), partly just because the owners were 'of that age' but also,
I think, because they'd grown tired of the increasingly difficult
struggle to make the business pay.
I don't, though, think there's any aggressive 'big business' invasion
here of the world of the small independent nurseryman. Which is in one
way encouraging and in another the reverse - since it's not happening,
I suspect, simply because it's so obvious that such nurserymen are
mostly in anything but a healthy commercial situation.
I can't imagine, though, that there won't always be new people
sufficiently mad about plants to take the job (vocation?) on - both
young ones at the beginning of professional horticultural careers and
older people taking early retirement from something else. Which is
partly pious hope - but also (I'd bet money - though not much) a fair
guess at the grip plant-addiction exerts and will continue to exert.
Tim Longville
