J. Parker’s Plant Village Garden

After nearly two decades away from summer shows, it was exciting to return to the RHS Tatton Flower Show last year. We hoped that the summer shows would provide an opportunity to showcase the quality of our products and service direct to gardeners across all sectors of the business, and thanks to the hard work of our team, this certainly proved to be the case. Our plant village display garden was a huge success and even became a talking point for visitors, with many lovely comments and praise passed along to team members.

This year, our plant village garden will be designed by our very own assistant manager and RHS-certified garden expert, Hannah Rowson. We caught up with her to learn more about her and the inspiration behind the display.

Has gardening always been a hobby of yours?

I’d say that gardening was a definite part of my childhood as we had a little vegetable patch at the bottom of my parent’s garden which we loved. As I got older, throughout high school and college I helped less and less but then when I started working at J. Parker’s whilst at university, I started to get back into it again, helping my parents with their garden and now I love it!

What is it that you enjoy most about gardening?

I think that it’s probably one of the only times where I completely switch off and just focus on what I’m doing when I’m gardening. You also can’t beat when all your plants and vegetables come into flower and fruit, it’s the best feeling seeing all your hard work pay off.

How did you get into gardening?

I think that it was a mixture of things really. As I said previously it was always a part of my life growing up but then I think working in the horticulture industry whilst doing my degree also got me into it. Whenever the new catalogues came out, I’d always flick through and see which my favourites were! Then I started helping my parents with their garden more and more and now I’m just obsessed with plants!

How does garden designing differ from your day-to-day work at Mottram Garden Centre?

I suppose everything differs really. At Mottram, I’m assisting the management of the garden centre and ordering seasonally to suit a multitude of tastes and requirements for our customers. The Tatton trade stall border has given me an opportunity to focus on one theme and to put a design together that will hopefully inspire people to try different plants/schemes in their own gardens.

What’s been your biggest challenge designing the trade stall border?

I would say that it’s probably narrowing down the choice of plants, there are so many plants that I love and would want to use but it’s not possible to cram them all in!

When designing, what was your process?

The first thing was deciding what our theme would be and what we wanted the stall border to represent. So, myself and the team decided that we wanted our colour theme to relate back to our show garden, to include drought tolerant and pollinator-friendly plants and also plants that we supply as part of the mail order. I also wanted the border to be as accessible as possible, so we haven’t chosen any plants that are extremely difficult to grow or get hold of. Then for the design itself, I decided to keep it as simple as possible with a cottage-style border full of colour. We want people to go home feeling like this is something that they could try in their own gardens and not feel intimidated by it, it doesn’t have to be fancy!

What can people at home look forward to most about the trade stall border at RHS Tatton?

There will be lots of plants that are in the border that are available to buy along with bulbs and other plants we sell at J Parkers. You can sign up for our mailing list, meet our team, and bag some exclusive discounts!