Cotswold Garden Flowers

Bob Brown planted an acre of Vale of Evesham market-garden land with unusual perennials in 1990, and Cotswold Garden Flowers has grown into one of the most quietly influential nurseries in Britain. Gardeners travel long distances for plants they cannot find anywhere else — and for the catalogue's famously frank verdicts, which will tell you plainly when a fashionable plant is not worth growing. Now run in partnership with his son Edmund, the nursery works peat-free and off-grid, propagating rarities on site among display beds that spill over with ideas. It is less a garden centre than a living reference library, tucked down a quiet lane outside Badsey.

A renowned plantsman's independent nursery with a national reputation among gardeners yet almost unknown to the general public — editorially rich and genuinely worth the detour.

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