wildflowers.co.uk (wildflowers.co.uk)

Member Name: cathy

Product:	wildflowers.co.uk
Date:	06/08/00 (163 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A unique resource

Disadvantages: Can't think of any

If you're interested in attracting wildlife to your garden you need to think about planting native species. The only problem is how to get hold of them. It's illegal, (and vandalism) to dig them up out of the wild and the local garden centre is only likely to stock a few of the most popular - primroses, bluebells, snowdrops etc.

Now there is a solution! Visit www.wildflowers.co.uk and you can buy over 400 wild native plants grown in peat-free soil.

The site offers you a self-extracting zip file of the current catalogue and price list which downloads in seconds. Both documents are in Rich Text Format - so most word-processors should be able to handle them ok. If you have any problems, you are invited to contact the webmaster, who will send you a file you can cope with. Plants are listed by favourite environment - shady, coastal, wet etc.

There is also a wonderful, searchable database which pulls up data cards with photographs and details of different plants. You can search by the common r latin name. One point - just because a species isn't in the database, doesn't mean it isn't in the catalogue. (As I discovered when I looked for bluebells - we're converting the garden into a native species garden and we want to replace the elderly Spanish bluebells with English ones).

Plants are available as large plugs or pot grown plants. Plugs are 25p each, 7cm pots 60p, 9cm pots 75p - all plus VAT. There's a minimum order of 100 plugs or 40 pots, with a delivery charge of £16. Small orders are delivered by carrier at cost or you can arrange your own collection from the nursery.

Other services include surveying & seed collection and contract growing. If they collect the seed for you and then grow the plants, they issue a certificate of provenence.

The nursery started in 1986 offering 78 species - so, you can see how it's grown. The website is very easy to use and a wonderful resource for garden
ers.

*UPDATE*
Catalogue and price list now supplied as PDF files - so you'll need to download Acrobat Reader if you haven't already gor it.

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