Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
OUR TRIP TO TRAP A TIGER
Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones have faced machete-wielding bandits on their adventures to find exotic plants – including a fiery tiger lily – for their Welsh nursery
Gardening is usual ly regarded as a fairly genteel hobby. You may get scratched by brambles, stung by nettles or accidentally whack yourself over the head with a rake, but few of us risk life and limb for our gardens – unless you’re Sue and Bleddyn Wynn- Jones of Crûg Farm Plants in North Wales.
This intrepid pair – Bleddyn is 70, Sue in her mid- 60s – have an approach to gardening which owes much to Indiana Jones. They think nothing of scaling mountains, scrambl ing t h rough gorges a nd ravi nes, f ight ing of f machete-wielding thugs or facing down bandits, all in order to bring home beautiful and unusual plants. ‘We don’t go looking for trouble,’ Bleddyn sighs, ‘but quite often it finds us. I suppose we don’t make life easy for ourselves.’
Until 1991, the couple, who live near Caernarfon in Gwynedd, were living a rather more sedate life as beef farmers. ‘BSE was on the horizon, and our farm was too small to generate a decent income,’ Sue says. Bleddyn already had a small sideline selling plants and thought he’d like to do it full- time, so they sold their herd, rented out most of their land, and opened a nursery. ‘From the beginning we wanted to specialise in hard-to-find plants,’ he says. ‘We were never going to be the sort of place that is wall-to-wall fuchsias, begonias and petunias.’
As they loved travelling, they hit on the idea of combining holidays with expeditions to find interesting plants. Their first trip, to Jordan, was a bit of a flop: the country is so hot that the specimens they collected didn’t thrive back home. ‘We realised we had to do a lot more homework,’ Bleddyn says. They spent hours doing research at Kew, reading up on the flora and habitat of different countries, and made lists of specific plants they wanted to find. Their next trip, to Taiwan, was much more successful, and they kept refining their plant- collecting techniques. Their most successful trip was to Vietnam, in 2007, when they came back with over 1,000 different types of plants.
Unlike Victorian plant hunters such as Ernest Wilson, George Forrest, David Douglas and Robert Fortune – sometimes referred to as ‘plant pirates’ for the ruthless
way they dug up vast swathes of plants to ship back to Britain – the WynnJoneses’ activities are carefully licensed and there are strict rules about how the plants can be transported. ‘We almost always bring back seed rather than plants, and by law the seed has to be scrupulously cleaned before it’s brought into the UK,’ Bleddyn says. ‘After a long day in the field we’re often hard at work in our hotel room, getting the seed out of its pod and free of any debris. With some seed, that can take ages.’
Although they make light of it, plant hunting in remote areas of the world can be dangerous. On a trip to Nepal they were confronted by two separate groups of Maoist guerrillas, who demanded money from them. ‘Not a very nice bunch,’ Bleddyn says. Mexico was a bit hairy, he recalls, and so was Guatemala, where they were ambushed by bandits armed with machetes. ‘They were just kids, but it was still pretty scary,’ Bleddyn says. ‘Luckily, Sue is very cool under pressure, but after an experience like that we do wonder if we’re a bit crazy.’
They agree, however, that the results have been worth the risks. The plant list at Crûg Farm is full of tantalising, little- known plants which are the results of their travels. Of the hundreds of plants they have introduced, one of the most commercially successful has been a glowing red tiger lily, Tigridia orthantha ‘Red-Hot Tiger’, collected in Mexico. Tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Rex’, with flamboyant palm-like leaves that are more than a metre wide, brought back from Taiwan, has also been a big hit, as has the shrubby Schefflera taiwaniana. Other popular plants include Chrysosplenium macrophyllum and the lovely yellow Chinese Toad Lily, Tricyrtis macrantha.
Sue and Bleddyn do all of their own propagating, which limits the number of plants they can sell, and even a spectacular specimen might have limited potential because it’s hard to reproduce. In their own garden they have a wonderful range of unusual hydrangeas but the plants are so slow to propagate that they aren’t viable commercially. Yet serious gardeners clamour for Crûg plants, and such is their fame that 60 per cent of their orders come from mainland Europe.
Their energy for finding new plants is undiminished – they have recently returned from a trip to Russia. ‘We’ll keep going as long as we enjoy it,’ Bleddyn says. ‘Our two children aren’t interested in the nursery, but maybe one of the grandchildren will follow in our footsteps. We’ll never get rich doing this job, but we’re never bored.’ The nursery is open by appointment until 4 April, when it opens from Thursday- Saturday. There is a mailorder service at crug-farm.co.uk.