Blooming brilliant

Will and Lauren Holley purchased a four-acre field in Somerset, converted it into a nursery, opened during lockdown and now their perennial plants are flying off the shelves. JULIE HARDING meets the go-getting couple

- JULIE HARDING

With a surname like Holley how could you work in any industry other than horticulture? If you didn’t, it wouldn’t seem right. Holley. The spelling may be ever so slightly different to the tree with the festive connotations whose branches are brought indoors to decorate myriad mantelpieces at Christmas time, but the mere word, however it is rendered, conjures up greenness and growth.

Today is a Tuesday in midsummer and Will Holley and his wife, Lauren, are sauntering around their Somerset nursery, Blooming Wild, pointing out their plants. There may be no sharp, shiny leafed, red-berried Ilex aquifolium here, but there are some eye-catching perennial specimens, including pink-flowered Echinacea pallida, the unusual blue/purple Cynoglossum nervosum, and the delicate clotted cream colour of Aruncus ‘Horatio’s blooms. In fact, there are a total of 9,000 plants on this shipshape site in Horsington on the edge of Somerset’s Blackmore Vale, but the Holleys want more. Many more. They have an insatiable thirst for plants that fit the bill of ‘naturalistic planting’ (see box), a look that evokes the feeling of a more wild landscape than many British gardens have boasted to date.

“The aim is to have 15,00020,000 plants to fill all our beds here,” says the ever-enthusiastic Lauren. There is ample space, it’s true. The long, rectangular nursery beds, edged neatly with wood, are empty at the far end, craving myriad new pots and their eye-catching contents.

As Blooming Wild is a relatively new venture, most of the pretty, easy-care perennials here today were originally bought in as young/bare-root plants mainly from within Britain, but occasionally from Holland. These are then grown on and nurtured with typical Holley affection and attention to details. But the couple has a very different plan long term.