HOUSE PLANTS CLEAN UP

Indoor plant sales are up 15-20 per cent this year, according to the Garden Centre Association and Horticultural Trades Association. Millennials showing off their urban jungles on Instagram remain a driver of this trend, as they seek to find something to nurture.

There was even a shortage of the super-popular cheese plant, a Seventies icon, in 2018.

The next step is for indooroutdoor house plants such as ferns (look out for Dryopteris wallichiana ‘Jurassic Gold’), as well as edible house plants and even house plant tools – Burgon & Ball recently launched a set.

Trade body plants@work says that Nasa’s influential 1989 clean air study showed how plants remove toxins and is still a driver for greening offices and homes.

Taking the theme a step further, Ikea and furniture designer Tom Dixon have put together the first indoor show garden for Chelsea’s Monument site this year, based on growing food and medicinal plants at home. Specialist nursery Millais and Hampshire’s Exbury gardens are bringing back the much-maligned rhododendron at Chelsea 2019. Millais Nurseries’ owner David Millais has propagated more than 100 unreleased varieties at Exbury which were in danger of being lost.

Among the best, he says, is the yellow ‘Jessica de Rothschild’, which is “compact, buds up a treat and flowers itself silly”. Although Exbury, at 200 acres, “is not your average garden” and suits larger rhodo varieties, ‘Jessica de Rothschild’ is “ideal for the smaller garden”. There are many pastels, pinks and yellows in the breeding programme.

Millais has seen year-on-year sales growth for five to six years and is continuing on that trend “partly because we have lost some competition – we’re one of the few specialist rhododendron nurseries still growing. We’re seeing more interest in plants you can’t get from garden centres. There are 32,000 named rhododendrons but garden centres may only sell the top 20.”

He adds that rhododendrons “took a dip” a few years ago when perennials and grasses became fashionable and gardens were getting smaller “but we aren’t seeing a dip any more”.

Heathers are undergoing a similar comeback – there is new replant of Wisley’s heather garden, for instance.

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