An innovative approach to promoting home grown plants received a great deal of interest at last week’s Woking Nursery Exhbition.

Pepperpot Nursery of Godalming, Surrey has been undertaking a trial, set up with backing from the HDC and NFU, to trial local provenance labels on the company’s herbs.

Nursery owner Neil Wallsgrove told Commercial Grower that the initiative aimed to discover whether the plant-buying public could be persuaded to buy UK and even regional plants ahead of those brought in from abroad.

The plant labels feature the ‘Home Grown’ logo together with the name of the county in which they were produced. It aims to tap into the current debate over air miles and local sourcing to boost sales of local plants.

Wallsgrove said that so far the initiative had been trialled in Secrett’s Garden Centre in Surrey, with two or three others also likely to take on the project.

He added that there have already been instance where customers had put back plants they were about to buy and switched to the locally sourced ones instead.

If successful the trial could be rolled out to further retail outlets next year.

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