It is lunchtime on an overcast September day and the café at Stewarts Garden Centre is teeming with customers. Some are taking a seat for a meal, while others tuck into a slice of homemade cake from a selection including meringue tarts and millionaire’s shortbread.
Well-priced, home-cooked food made from locally sourced ingredients is one of the enduring attractions of the centre in Christchurch, Dorset, which celebrates its 70th anniversary next month, said Martin Stewart, 67. He is the owner of Stewarts, an eighth-generation family business that also owns garden centres in Fareham and Wimborne, a new £3 million nursery, and a commercial landscape gardening arm.
The other thing that keeps customers coming back is the sense of community, adds Stewart, who frequently toddles off mid-conversation to clear tables and chat to customers. Right on cue, Beryl, a smartly dressed lady who will disclose only that she’s “80-plus”, appears and embraces Stewart. She and her husband retired to Dorset from London in 2011 and she says she’s come to Stewarts not to shop but because she’s feeling “a bit miserable” and knows she’s likely to bump into friends.
Thankfully for Stewart, other people are still parting with their cash: sales nudged up from £15.3 million the previous year to nearly £16.1 million in the 12 months to January. Eighty per cent of revenues are from retail.
As Stewarts Garden Centre prepares to mark its anniversary with events and special offers for members, the sector as a whole is hoping for brighter times ahead. For decades, the industry has been a flourishing corner of UK retail: there are an estimated 2,300 sites nationally, supporting 722,000 jobs in the wider horticultural industry, according to the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA).
British shoppers love their gardens: they spent £9 billion on garden retail products in 2023. According to HTA surveys, there were an estimated 203 million visits to garden centres last year, with the typical UK adult visiting a garden centre 3.8 times in 2024.
The Stewart family moved their business to Dorset after it started as a nursery in Scotland
STEWARTS GARDEN CENTRES
The Stewart family business started as a nursery in Scotland. Martin Stewart’s grandfather, David, moved to Dorset, where he opened a branch of the nursery business. His son Ted, an RAF pilot, went on a trip to America in the spring of 1955, which opened his eyes to the concept of pre-packaged trees and plants in pots that could be sold in a retail environment. Hitherto, nurseries just sold plants that had been freshly dug from the ground.
Ted Stewart, left, with his father, Martin, was inspired by garden centres he saw in America
The family say it was Ted who imported the concept to the UK and the first garden centres in Britain were born. The idea was so new that when Ted launched his second garden centre five years later, 6,000 people turned up to the opening.
The company became Martin’s in 1982, when his father died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. Stewart had only just decided that he wanted to permanently join the family firm, much to his father’s delight. “I told him on the Friday that I was loving it … And then he dropped dead on the Monday morning. It was absolutely bizarre.”
Ted’s legacy lives on in the enduring appeal of the garden centre, although like the rest of the economy the sector has had its thornier moments, particularly in recent years. The halcyon days of Covid, when months of lockdowns led to bumper sales at garden centres as homeowners undertook renovation projects in place of foreign holidays, were followed by the cost of living crisis. Dobbies, Britain’s biggest garden centre owner, closed at least 24 of its centres and “little Dobbies” high street stores in the last financial year.
However, speaking to The Sunday Times from Birmingham’s NEC Arena, which last week hosted Glee, the sector’s largest annual trade fair, Peter Burks, chief executive of the Garden Centre Association, said the atmosphere was buoyant. “Everyone is very positive. Most people have had a good year because we had unbroken sunshine in the spring and generally a good summer, so gardening sales were fantastic. I think there was likely some pent-up demand from last year, when the weather was poor.”
Also attending Glee was the chief executive of Dobbies, David Robinson, who said the company was “feeling optimistic about the future”.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics on Friday showed that retail sales rose by 0.5 per cent last month, having increased by the same amount in July. HTA figures for the six months to June indicated that sales at garden centres were up 10 per cent year-on-year.
Nonetheless, Burks said the industry was bracing itself for tax rises in the budget on November 26. Among centre owners, concerns range from increases in business rates to a potential plan to move 18-year-olds on to the higher-rate minimum wage currently paid to over-21s. Burks said: “It’s just putting more cost on more cost, and they can’t just suddenly make more money. The only way really to make more money is to put prices up, and that’s not going to be very popular.”
Hannah Powell, director of Perrywood
PERRYWOOD
Hannah Powell, a director of Perrywood, which runs three garden centres in Essex and Suffolk, said surging employment costs had led to her management teams thinking “really carefully about operating costs and efficiencies. We don’t want to reduce headcount because our team is really important to us.” The company employs 325 staff. Powell said renegotiating with suppliers had led to “tens of thousands” of savings in its catering department.
Stewart said the increase in national insurance contributions had cost his company an extra £175,000. “How can it be right that you hammer companies that employ people?
“It’s just a wonderful challenge getting old and young, boys and girls, working together to achieve something, it’s magic. But right now you feel like a pariah … because [the government is] making it so hard.”
Another challenge that is perhaps less easily blamed on the chancellor is a surge in shoplifting, which is affecting retail more broadly. The British Retail Consortium has said that customer theft reached a record £2.2 billion in 2023-24, accompanied by a rising tide of violence: incidents of staff abuse rose by 50 per cent to more than 2,000 a day. Stewart says the problem is getting worse. In February, four young men threatened staff at the Christchurch store with a long-handled lopper “using it almost like a javelin” after being caught shoplifting.
Although no one was hurt, the workers involved were, unsurprisingly, “shaken up”. Staff, some of whom have worked for the family business for decades, have been told not to intervene, but Stewart said they “are so engaged … they’re almost more defensive of the business than we are”. No one has been charged.
Despite all the challenges, Stewart says his passion endures for the firm that he unexpectedly inherited 43 years ago. He’s evidently happy that his daughter, Amy, who previously worked in branding in London and Singapore, has joined the family firm, but maintains that there is no pressure for her to succeed him as its next custodian.
“You’ve got to really love it in the good times because that’s what gets you through the tough times,” he said.
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