Missing spring dooms £50m of our favourite early blooms
PLANT growers are having to ditch £50million worth of spring flowers because the awful weather has kept gardeners indoors.
Home and garden chains like B&Q and Homebase have slashed orders for pansies, primroses and violas.
And now independent growers like the Blue Ribbon nursery near Chichester, West Sussex, need to make room for summer varieties like geraniums, petunias and begonias.
More than 30 million individual plants are being composted says the British Protected Ornamentals Association. Its 170 members have each lost nearly £300,000 worth.
The Association’s Ian Riggs said yesterday: “People have just not stepped into their gardens to fill their borders and pots this spring because it has been so cold.”
Blue Ribbon boss Walter Back, 70, has now ordered Mariska De Wolde and other staff to clear away stock.
He said: “It’s been a terrible year and the worst I can remember since starting out in 1962.”
