Summerhill Garden Centre

The garden centre was purchased by our family in 1982. It was a run down market garden occupying 8 acres. There was a small, very leaky shop selling pot plants, cut flowers and fruit and vegetables, along with 3 polythene tunnels which were used to grow some of the cut flowers for the shop. In addition, there was a very old glass house which had a few trees and shrubs for sale and a small area of nursery which had two glass houses in which were grown bedding plants for sale in the shop. There were 3 members of staff, 2 full time and 1 part time.
There are four of us in our family. None of us had any retail or horticultural experience but we all enjoyed hard work and relished the challenge of building the business.
We have since expanded the site to 18 acres.

There is a large retail shop and covered sales area, a very large plant area and patio containing our pots, statues and fountains, a well stocked yard area containing composts, soil improvers, soil mulches and top dressings, rockery stone, fencing and slabs. Our franchises compliment the site by providing an award winning restaurant, a pet centre, a camping and clothing centre and a conservatory and hot tub centre.

Over the years our staff level has risen to almost 40 staff and 2 of the directors have since retired, leaving Karen and Simon (brother and sister) to run the business.
Horticulture was the passion behind the business. We were the first company in England to bring Italian plants over here. And this has remained one of the key and most important elements in the business. Plants are what Garden Centres should be all about and we have a genuine love and enjoyment of these beautiful things and of nature itself.

Our care and respect for this side of our business will continue to grow into the future and our memory of our humble beginnings will never fade and of the people who have worked with us along the way to make our beautiful Garden Centre what it is today. We could never have achieved so much alone.

There are several aspects of our business which we are often complimented on but something that is always brought to our attention by friends and customers is the quality of our staff. Each and everyone are genuinely happy to help and assist our customers in whichever way they need us. We are also very skilled in our particular field of expertise and so can give the correct advice and guidance that is required. We will also take the time and effort to research any question that we do not know the answer to, as this further expands our own knowledge. Customers always comment on the happy atmosphere and the buzz and energy that we all create with our ethic of hard work and commitment to our job and our way of life.

We are in the fortunate position to have our own nursery on site, where we grow a lot of our own plants each season. This means that we can bring the plants up fresh each morning to satisfy the needs of our customers. We research carefully new varieties each season, but also like to keep in stock our old, well respected varieties, which our customers keep coming back for each year.

So please come and visit us and experience this for yourself. We would gladly welcome your views and opinions on how you find our centre – its good and bad points, any products you feel we are missing, how you find our prices, and any members of staff that you would like to comment on. Any and all customer feed back is treated in strictest confidence and greatly appreciated – we need your help and guidence to be able to improve. Please remember that if we are not doing something a particular way or stocking a particular item it could just be that we had not thought of it yet.