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Plants from cyberspace

Matthew Biggs visits the Surrey HQ of award-winning online nursery Crocus, whose huge stock of desirable plants tempts the public and Chelsea show-garden designers alike. Photographs Fiona McLeod

Since www.crocus.co.uk opened for business at 6.13am on 2 April 2000, it has become the quintessential 21st-century online garden centre, a one-stop shop renowned for its seductive images of must-have plants, where customers can visit the garden centre from the comfort of their own home.

Through its wholesale outlet, Crocus supplies top garden designers including Tom Stuart-Smith, Isabelle Van Groeningen and Andy Sturgeon. This benefits both sides, allowing Crocus to keep in touch with the latest trends and ensure that ‘hot’ plants are available to its customers.

Crocus also has a reputation for being able to find Chelsea designers plants that are unusual or obscure. This year, Tom Stuart-Smith asked for Selaginella helvetica, a fern-like perennial for deep, moist shade. After guidance from a fern expert and several phone calls, it was tracked down to a small nursery in Germany, which supplied the plants, and other new cultivars.

This year Crocus is building gardens and providing plants for Arabella Lennox-Boyd and Tom Stuart-Smith, and supplying plants to Andy Sturgeon and others. And many are from the same range that you can buy online for your garden from the comfort of your home.

Mathew Biggs
Gardens Illustrated May 2008

Growing demand for Chelsea cloud trees

Demand for a tree with cloud-shaped foliage has soared after it featured in the garden that won the Chelsea Flower Show. Stockists have reported a shortage of Hornbeams, which can be meticulously pruned and sculpted.

The tree helped Tom Stuart-Smith win the coveted Best In Show last week for his garden at Chelsea. Now it appears every gardener in the country wants one. More than 20 people have tried to buy the nine £3,000 trees used in his Laurent Perrier Garden, which were each 35-years-old.

Peter Clay of Crocus, the garden centre that supplied the trees, said: "In less than a week we have had over 20 enquiries from people wanting to buy the trees used in Tom Stuart-Smith’s garden, but we are having to turn them away as they have already been sold to a private estate."

Crocus is offering to fly clients to Germany to select their perfect tree from 300 to 400-acre orchards.

Rupert Neate
Daily Telegraph May 2008

Crocus beds into Homebase with plants online

The deal will see Crocus - the UK's largest online garden centre - offer its entire range on the Homebase website.

Crocus was founded in 2000 with £1.5m of seed funding from a consortium of investors, which included Lord Rothschild and Henry Kravis of private equity group Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Last year the retailer made a small profit on sales of £10m. Amy Whidburn, head of trading at Homebase, said: "Like Homebase, the Crocus business is based on providing customers with the highest quality plants, and the new partnership will allow Homebase to deliver a much greater choice"

Daily Telegraph April 2008

Chelsea Flower Show 2008: The race is on

CHELSEA DIARY: PART 1

"Chelsea is in many ways a miracle," says garden designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd.

"On an appointed day lorries roll in filled with perfect plants which, after a few days hard work, arranged into a near-perfect garden.It seems instantaneous but behind the scenes many weeks, months and often years have gone into producing and then finding these special plants."

All the plants are being supplied by Crocus,
the mail order plant specialist, but the Lennox-Boyd team have been actively involved in the hunt, taking in Italy, Germany, Holland and the UK.

"It is very humbling", says Arabella, "to think that so many people are working so hard to ensure the garden is as good as it could possibly be. I am eternally grateful to everyone whose expertise, dedication and sheer hard work makes everything possible."

Libby Russell
Telegraph.co.uk April 08

As shopping on the web becomes increasingly popular, even the staunchest supporters of the high street are making the most of the internet. But building brand loyalty online is no mean feat - impeccable customer service and unfaltering delivery are just two of the many prerequisites. We asked some of the biggest names in retail, industry experts and the Retail Week team to select the online retailers they respect the most. Well-known web sites and independent retailers alike feature among the stars of cyberspace.

Crocus.co.uk

"This site oozes passion and expertise about plants, with a touch of Titchmarsh and Dimmock celebrity on top. Above all - with the most perishable and fragile of products - the care taken in packaging and transit is superb, with consistently high plant quality. Lead times pale against Amazon, which has raised the bar for all online retailers, but on the key dimensions of authority and reliability, it's hard to fault."

Alan Giles, chairman, FatFace
Retail Week - July 2007

Everything in the garden is.....available over the internet. Keen horticulturalist Margaret Dibben puts five online nurseries to the test to find out whether there's more to going digital than having green fingers.

Crocus score 9/10

'The website is informative and easy to use and offers a choice of more than 3,000 varieties. Crocus guarantees to replace plants if they fail within one year, and you can return any plant within seven days. I bought phlox paniculata 'David'. It had been reduced in price from £5.95 to £4.45, with delivery costing £5.95 for any number of plants. The plant was delivered in a pot, in outstanding condition. Small green shoots quickly developed. Size-wise, the pot was 2 litres in volume and the roots just reached the sides. Delivery was 'within one week' and the company throws in a Virgin Wines voucher for new customers. It arrived on 15 January. Overall, this is the best website for plants'.

The Observer - March 2007

'.. if we are a nation of garden lovers, and, one could argue convincingly, the greatest gardening nation on earth, why are our garden centres in crisis? It's not only the late, cold, wet spring and the hosepipe-less, parched summer that will have caused some people to give gardening a miss this year, and that has hurt smaller companies in particular.

Whereas, in the 1970s, the rapid expansion of garden centres filled a long-term gap in the retail market, now there is more competition than ever before. Large DIY chains sell plants and related goods at prices very few independent retailers could compete with, because of the power of bulk buying…..

But there is obviously still a huge market for places selling plants in an individual way and one that helps gardeners who are keener than they are experienced. It's all very well being told by well paid, well trained garden designers on the telly that you should plant in such-and-such a style, but if you get to a huge nursery and find you don't know what you're looking at, you're just as liable to come away empty-handed.

This is where the internet has been making significant inroads into the market. Companies such as Crocus, the online nursery that supplied the plants for Tom Stuart-Smith's "Best in Show" Daily Telegraph Chelsea garden, keep up to the minute with fashions in horticulture and give their customers a tailor-made service, supplying a whole border if needed or selling plants by colour…..

In America, for example, some garden centres divide their plants up between what grows in shade and what thrives in sun, as well as giving regular demonstrations on pruning and other practical matters. That would be a start, because, if you can't compete on price, you have to do it with service.

The truth remains that, even with the vagaries of the weather, there has never been a better time to be a gardener in Britain.

Lila Das Gupta,
The Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2006

Tom Stuart-Smith's garden of sumptuous purple and blue naturalistic planting set against walls of avant-garde rusty steel won the best in show award for The Daily Telegraph at Chelsea Flower Show.

One Royal Horticultural Society judge described it as "without question, the best show garden I have ever seen". His fellow judges praised its "extremely high levels of creativity".

Stuart-Smith was planning a year off when Kylie O'Brien, The Daily Telegraph's gardening editor, called last September and asked him to "just think about" designing a Chelsea garden. To her surprise, he said he would do it.

A legion of difficulties ensued - an attack by deer on the nursery at Crocus where Stuart-Smith's hornbeam hedges were kept, a slipped disc which laid him out for six weeks and blustery weather which meant that his signature purple bearded irises had to be fixed erect with hundreds of hazel stakes cut by his 13-year-old son Harry.

Yet the resulting garden, combining modernism and romanticism, was a "clear and totally uncontroversial" winner in a strong field of seven gold medals, said Bob Sweet, the RHS shows director.

The Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2006

I live on a communal garden in Notting Hill, but also have a little bit of garden of our own. Needless to say this offers my neighbours opportunity to craft perfect Chelsea Garden Show standard displays in their own back yards. I tried it myself: I tried seeding the lawn, bribing the communal gardener, and blagging plants from neighbour the owner of Crocus (online retailer of plants etc) basically porn for the green-fingered) but nothing ever worked.

Evening Standard, 22 May 2006

'Keen but clueless' in his garden, Peter Clay was frustrated at the lack of help available. So he set up an online business to fill the gap - and found a huge market of baffled customers.

Peter Clay was 42 and the highly paid MD of an American ad agency when he felt the first flush of the male menopause. "It was a purely visceral thing," he says. "I was restless, looking for a move before the gardening bug came along and I thought 'That's it!'"

Five years on, ex-Etonian Clay has morphed into the Johnny Boden of horticulture with Crocus, the online and mail-order plant centre, which was recently awarded eSuperbrand status.

The Superbrand Council (Crocus was one of 300 chosen out of 3,000 for the 2006 listing) also ran a survey asking online customers where they would spend a £100 windfall. Amazingly for a tiny company, Crocus was placed fifth behind such giants as Amazon and eBay.

The company has won a clutch of prizes, grown exponentially (they sold 75,000 plants in 2000, and expect to hit 500,000 this year) and has won five gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show, building and supplying plants for show gardens.

The customer profile wasn't hard to dream up: "it was me", Clay says, "a keen but clueless gardener." Imagining yourself as the customer is no bad way to do business and they were on to something as the dotcom bubble was still a novelty and they were catering to time-poor, urban people who wanted a garden to reflect their taste and lifestyle. "These people were already using the internet for all kinds of things," says Clay. "The democracy of the net allows people to learn quickly and gardening doesn't have to be a life-time apprenticeship."

The Times Magazine, 20 May 2006

Internet garden retailer Crocus has announced growth of 45 per cent in 2005 despite difficult market conditions.

Consumers using the site are younger than those visiting garden centres and spend more freely, according to (managing director Mark) Fane. “Our consumers are interested in saving time – that, coupled with an extensive range, is what we provide.”

Fane sold Waterers Landscape to ISS in 2000 for £35 million. He maximised his existing contacts from Waterers in setting up Crocus.

Further acquisitions are planned following the purchase of www.gonegardening.com earlier this year. Expansion plans include doubling annual turnover by 2010. Fane added: ”People still want to visit garden centres, we are just giving them another option.”

Horticultural Week, 6 October 2005

While gardening centre sales have been flat, mirroring the high street in general, internet retailing is still on an upward curve. Online-only garden retailer Crocus's sales in June of this year were nearly 50 per cent higher than last year.

Crocus founder Peter Clay says: "Gardening seems to be a beneficiary of the consumer trend towards 'cocooning', which means that people are increasingly happy to shop from home, rather than venture on to the high street."

Horticulture Week, 11 August 2005

With Chelsea just weeks away, horticulturists around the world are frantically pruning and pampering plants to perfection. However, at a nursery in Windlesham, Surrey, the air is one of relative calm. The team at Crocus, the web-based nursery, has been preparing for this year's show since April 2004, working on the Laurent-Perrier garden designed by five-times gold medal winner, Tom Stuart-Smith.

For Tom, having the right team is a vital ingredient for success at Chelsea. Crocus has put together his last four medal-winning gardens; its strength, he says, is in its organisation and ability to deliver; 'Crocus has huge tentacles and will find anything'.

Sourcing is down to one of Crocus's three permanent buyers, Mark Straver. Mark orders literally millions of plants every year for the nursery, so he knows instantly who to call for the best plant, and never buys from anyone unless he's visited their nursery.

The hard landscaping is also down to Crocus. Mark Fane project managers a team of builders. If all goes to plan, the garden will be finished on the Saturday before the show starts, giving the plants time to settle in and turn their heads in the right direction before official judging begins.

Eight days later it'll be over and the team from Crocus will be back to pick up the plants. Unlike other exhibitors, Crocus's big sell-off doesn't take place when the bell rings. As befits the UK's largest online nursery, it takes place on the internet. As Peter Clay says, 'You, too, can have a designer plant from Chelsea'. 'With a hangover', Mark adds.

Gardenlife Magazine, June 2005

Although there are only three weeks to go before Chelsea Flower Show, the scene at Crocus.co.uk is determinedly low-key. There are clues, however – the 35 weeping hornbeams poised like supermodels preparing for the catwalk, for instance. It isn't just that each 6m-tall Carpinus betulus 'Pendula' is worth £2,500, but more that they have come from Germany to star in Tom Stuart-Smith's show garden for Laurent-Perrier, which Crocus will be building.

It is an unlikely collaboration – the celebrated designer and the country's biggest online plant shop, which gives botanical Latin second billing to common names so as not to frighten the “keen-but-clueless”. But it has been extremely successful. Stuart-Smith has won three of this Chelsea gold medals with Crocus's support; in 2003, eight Chinese dogwoods, expertly coaxed into flower a month early, helped his garden for Laurent-Perrier take Best

Crocus is an entirely mail-order business, selling through the internet and three printed catalogues a year. The nursery is not open to visitors. If Crocus doesn't have a plant, it will try to suggest an alternative supplier, and two “plant doctors” provide online advice.

Mark Fane and schoolfriend Peter Clay dreamt up the idea of an online garden centre over a curry, and Crocus was launched at 6.13am on April 2, 2000. Five years on, the company stocks up to 3,000 plants depending on the season, growing 35 per cent to 40 per cent of them on from plugs.

After the Chelsea Flower Show, which ends on May 28, many of the plants will go on sale at Crocus.co.uk. Fane refuses to go to the dismantling of the garden: “I hate it. You move from a building site to what you hope is a finished work of art, then someone comes along and starts scraping away the paint.”

The Telegraph, 30 April 2005

While most of the horticultural website companies that began in 2000 are now pushing up the daisies, crocus.co.uk is positively blooming.

Its customers buck the trend of typical internet users and their average spend is four times that at an ordinary garden centre.

Garden centres had a tough time in 2004, posting zero or negative growth. "Bad weather meant no one went out shopping in early spring," said Mr Clay. "They sat at home and ordered through us." He said the typical spend at garden centres is £14 to £15. The first purchase by a crocus customer is £25 to £30.

With more than 100,000 customers and growing by 40pc each year, crocus takes it as a good omen that it bucks the trend for internet customers, usually males under 30. But of its customers, 35pc are in their thirties; 29pc in their fifties and 85pc are female. "When we began", said Messrs Fane and Clay, "52pc of our customers described themselves as keen but clueless, and 48pc as experienced. Nowadays the figures are reversed. It would be nice if that were because of us."

The Business Telegraph, 17 January 2005

Two old schoolmates set up Crocus to give gardeners a much wider choice of plants.

The business is a breakthrough in the £3 billion-a-year garden sector. Not only are 80% of Crocus's sales online, but it ensures that customers get larger-than-usual plants, elaborately packed and always in perfect condition. It is now the biggest online seller of plants in Britain.

At a time when many garden centres are cutting back their range of plants to fewer than 250, Crocus lists up to 3,000. If it doesn't have them in stock, it can get them to its customers within a week, often from specialist nurseries.

Now, more than four years after the launch, the careful husbandry of Fane and Clay has developed the business. Turnover has topped £3.5m with a forecast of £4.5m for the year to October 31, 2005.

The Sunday Times, 19 December 2004

A Web-enabled direct marketing operation with its own nursery, Crocus offers the keen amateur gardener a range of plants that previously was available only to professionals. It also has a thriving wholesale business supplying professional landscape gardeners - it's supplying Sir Terence Conran for his show garden at Chelsea this year.

Crocus claims to be the UK's biggest gardening site, with nearly 100,000 customers since its launch in April 2000. The site has won numerous awards, including the Yell.com Best Commerce Site in 2001, has weathered the dotcom winter, and still has support of its backers. Sales are growing at nearly 40% a year, and 43% of these are to repeat customers. The average order value is now nearly £70 - no mean feat when most plants are only two or three pounds each.

Clay believes that Crocus's service is proving a hit with customers, particularly at a time when garden centres are consolidating. "We aimed to give people more choice than they could get elsewhere but with greater confidence," he says. "As they get more confident, they're prepared to buy more."

New Age Media, 3 June 2004

Top gardeners join Crocus

Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh, the television gardeners, have signed up with Crocus, the online garden centre. The presenters will provide advice to customers by e-mail and on the internet. They are being paid in a mixture of cash and shares in Crocus, which secured its second round of financing in March. Mark Fane, chief executive, said: “This is exciting for us because it solidifies our position as the No1 gardening site.” Titchmarsh said: “It's rare for internet business to be run by a team so passionate and knowledgeable about their trade.”

The Sunday Times, 23 September 2001

A Majestic performance

Despite the collapse of the dotcom bubble, The Sunday Telegraph's @chievement 2001 awards for excellence in technology and e-commerce attracted almost 200 entries, a record…Crocus.co.uk, an online garden centre, picked up the small business award, which was open to those with an annual turnover of less than 1m…Alison Hutchinson, chief executive officer of Barclays B2B.com, called on firms to “go back to basics” and focus on customers' needs, rather than jumping on the dotcom bandwagon. “As one of the judges of the @chievement 2001 Awards, I was delighted by the basic approach which makes Majestic, Tesco and Crocus such outstanding winners. Each has focused on ensuring that its e-commerce strategy is as integrated within its business model as its attention to providing excellent products, customer services, marketing and fulfillment.” “We are a small company, but thanks to the @chievement 2001 Awards we are talked about in the same breath as Tesco.com - one of the most significant forces in e-commerce,” said Peter Clay.

Richard Fletcher,
The Sunday Telegraph, 1 July 2001

Crocus blossoms on the net

This year's Chelsea Flower Show produced a new star in Crocus – not the humble spring flower, but an online garden centre which became the first internet company to win one of two gold medals at the horticultural extravaganza. The Crocus garden, designed by Tom Stuart-Smith and sponsored by Laurent Perrier, wowed the judges with its avenue of 12 lime trees and a meadow comprising 2,000 Japanese grasses and 6,000 herbaceous plants…The garden has drawn attention to Crocus the company, one of the few British B2C internet outfits that has continued to forge ahead despite the collapse of the dotcom bubble, and which is gaining increasing acceptance among gardeners.

Lauren Mills,
The Sunday Telegraph, 3 June 2001

Net gardener sows seeds for success

Dotcom doom has been beaten by the great gardening boom. Crocus.co.uk, an online nursery, has raised third-round financing of £2m from a clutch of blue-chip investors including Cazenove, Lord Rothschild and Henry Kravis, founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the American leverage-buyout specialist. Mark Fane, chief executive of Crocus, says this time around it was much harder to raise funds. Most dotcom firms would amend that to say it is all but impossible to attract finance. “There was much more analysis this time,” Fane said. “If you go back 18 months to when we first started, there was such euphoria about the internet that fundraising was relatively easy.” Although investors may have turned away from the internet, customers have not. Crocus, which sells plants and provides information and advice to gardeners, is seeing sales rise by 50% every three months. The company believes this round of financing will see it through to profitability in two years' time.

Kirstie Hamilton
The Sunday Times, 18 March 2001