Nurseries In Wiltshire, Derry Watkins’ Special Plants sells favourite plants grown from seed or propagated from cuttings.

Something Special

Only plants that are loved by Derry Watkins are available from her Wiltshire nursery, Special Plants, which sells highly covetable perennials and other fascinating plants, many grown from seed or propagated from cuttings

WORDS CINEAD McTERNAN PHOTOGRAPHS REBECCA BERNSTEIN

Derry Watkins has a preference for tender plants, finding “the rewards are far greater”.

When Derry Watkins speaks of her nursery, Special Plants in south-west England, it brings to mind the proverb, ‘If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.’ In Derry’s case, this is just as well, since running a nursery is not for the faint hearted: early starts, late nights, backbreaking lifting and wrangling wheelbarrows are all part and parcel of this particular day job.

A passionate gardener and self-confessed plantaholic, Derry got the bug for selling her surplus home-grown plants at weekly Women’s Institute markets, where she met fellow enthusiasts and revelled in the experience. However, it wasn’t until she’d met Alice Doyle, owner of Log House Plants in Oregon, in the early 1990s, that she decided to take the plunge and start her own nursery.

“My family and I were on a six-month sabbatical in the States,” Derry recalls. “I was volunteering at a local nursery to keep busy, and that’s where I met Alice. She was truly inspiring – we shared the same passion for plants and I learned so much from her. She also helped me to understand that it was possible to build a profitable business around growing and selling the plants you love.”

According to Derry, opening Special Plants was more of an organic process than a ‘ta-dah’ moment. “It felt like the right time,” she explains. “I had turned 40, the kids were old enough for me to have the freedom to work, and I already had the infrastructure in our garden.” A large 40-foot greenhouse had been on Derry’s rider when she and her husband chose to move to Bath, rather than back to the States, ten years earlier. “Staying in England was one thing,” says Derry, “but I put my foot down about gardening through another English winter without a greenhouse. I love growing tender plants. They need a lot of attention compared to hardy varieties, but the rewards are far greater: they are more beautiful, have more interesting foliage and flower more prolifically too.”

Derry started out selling conservatory plants, but within a few years she had expanded her stock to include hardy herbaceous plants, rockery plants and annuals, with a particular focus on unusual varieties from all over the world since she felt there was little point in competing with garden centres. Growing around 80 per cent of her stock either from cuttings or saved seed, she made up the remainder with new varieties and plants that were too hard to propagate herself. “I enjoyed the freedom and flexibility of growing only plants I loved,” she says, “and my customers benefitted from an ever-changing plant list.”

She describes her choice of plants as ‘intuitive’, and her exquisite taste and sense of style is testament to a life dedicated to hands-on growing – years of getting her fingernails dirty as well as visiting gardens. “I decided to learn about non-vegetable gardening by setting myself the challenge of going to Hidcote Manor in the Cotswolds once a month for a year, to try to follow the logic of the planting,” she recalls. She was also inspired by leading names in the horticultural world: “Christopher Lloyd, who wrote the first gardening book I fell in love with,” and the doyenne of gardening, Rosemary Verey.

“I met Rosemary at the Chelsea Flower Show before I opened the nursery,” Derry explains. “She had created a beautiful vegetable parterre, but I couldn’t help wondering how it would look after the first few harvests – so I asked her.” Agreeing that in a real-life setting the garden wouldn’t remain so pristine, but that “it was Chelsea, after all”, Rosemary and Derry struck up a friendship based on their mutual love of plants, and it was thanks to Rosemary that Derry put together her first plant catalogue. “She wanted to know what I sold at the W.I. markets,” Derry recalls, “but I didn’t have a plant list at the time, so I had to put one together from scratch.” It was a significant moment, not just because Rosemary would become a long-standing customer, ordering on a monthly basis for her glorious garden at Barnsley House, but because it gave Derry confidence, helping her to believe in herself as a plantswoman running her own nursery. Nine years on, Derry was in desperate need of more space to accommodate her ever-growing nursery, and she and her husband made the move to their current home, just north of Bath. “It wasn’t a perfect site,” says Derry, matter-offactly. “Sure, it was bigger and had more space for a garden but that space was a derelict field on a steep hill, which proved to be a daily pain.” Evidently not enough of a pain to dent Derry’s indomitable spirit, and any problems were swiftly overcome. “I reorganised the nursery so we were ferrying the plants down the hill rather than up it, and although I’ve never managed to put in a decent watering system, we coped with watering by hand because we displayed the plants according to their needs – ‘plants for damp shade’, ‘plants for dry sun’, ‘tender plants’. That allowed us to keep the drought-tolerant varieties at the top and the moisture lovers at the bottom where the water collected.”

Above Nurserywoman Derry Watkins, who set up Special Plants some 30 years ago; it’s now based near Chippenham in Wiltshire.

Above left Derry’s large greenhouse with its curved roof houses tender plants for sale. Above right Nearly 80 per cent of the plants are propagated from cuttings or saved seed. Below right Moisture -loving Primula vialii. Below left A selection of plants for sale at the nursery; mail order is also available between September and March.

More plant fairs Above left A greenhouse followed, The Hardy was on Derry’s rider Plant Society and the when the decision was made to stay in Bath.NCCPG (now Plant Above right Hedysarum Heritage), which was coronarium has fragrant a lifeline for Derry. “It cerise-red fl owers held gave me an idea of the above vetch-like foliage. Below right Elegant type of plants people Salvia ‘Blue Note’. liked,” she explains. “It Below left Bright pink was also quite a solitary Silene armeria ‘Electra’. existence on the nursery in those early days, so doing these fairs meant I could be sociable – even if it was just once a week.”

Never one to shy away from a challenge, a few years after opening Derry started attending prestigious Royal Horticultural Society fl ower shows. “I remember that time as a whirl of running the business, doing the marketing and PR and designing the stands and growing the stock. I was doing 47 shows a year all over the country – I look back at that period now and wonder how I did it.”

An unexpected bonus of the shows turned out to be the success of Derry’s seed business. “When I did the Chelsea Flower Show I wasn’t allowed to sell plants, so to o set the cost I sold a few seeds. It was so popular that I always took a box of seeds to each of the shows from then on. Finally, in around 2005, I made myself a basic website where you could see pictures but had to ring me up or email me to buy the seeds. It wasn’t until 2015 that we fi nally added a shopping basket. What luxury – and the seed sales started to go through the roof! To our complete surprise, seed sales are now a third of our income.”

Throughout her years of running Special Plants, Derry has always found time to travel – on her own

Left Tender plants including cannas and begonias line up on the greenhouse’s benches. Right Quirky, rusted eyecatchers in the garden. Below Origanum ‘Kent Beauty’ perfectly encapsulates Derry’s knack for finding unusual but beautiful plants.

and with friends, like Alice Doyle – in search of new plants. “I won a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship in 1993, to spend three months plant hunting in South Africa. It was an astonishing opportunity and taught me the value of getting out and meeting like-minded people. I knew nobody when I arrived; by the time I left I had made life-long friends, found exciting new plants and discovered a new outlet for my passion.” Trips to India, Nepal, Chile, Turkey and Bulgaria have resulted in many new plants, but when asked if she sees herself as a plantswoman or a plant hunter, she replies modestly: “I am a very amateur plant hunter – it’s more go look and see than to collect.” Well, amateur or not, Special Plants continues to influence and delight designers and gardeners all over the world. n

Special Plants, Greenways Lane, Cold Ashton, Chippenham, Wiltshire SN14 8LA. Tel: +44 (0)1225 891686; specialplants.net

Sowing Hardy Perennials

Derry Watkins shares her experience of growing perennials from seed for the most reliable results

Seed is almost always best sown fresh, so hardy perennials, which bloom in spring and summer and set their seed in late summer and autumn, are best sown then. Some can be dried off to wait for a spring sowing, but most will germinate better if sown as soon as they’ve ripened and left outside over winter. After all, nature designed them to ripen in autumn and fall on the ground to sow themselves.

I tend to always sow in pots, unless I have handfuls of seed. There is too much competition from weeds, birds, squirrels and slugs for seeds that are sown in situ. Sow seed thinly and shallowly. I usually sow in a layer of vermiculite on the top of the pot, ensuring a sterile, free-draining environment for those first new roots.

Soak the pots after sowing and drain them well to settle the seeds in. If you then cover them with an airtight lid, they probably won’t need watering again until the seeds have germinated, and hardy perennials don’t need any extra heat. If left outside, rain and snow will look after them.

Remember, seed wants to grow. Just don’t get in its way.