About Us
W D Smith and Son is a family-owned business that has been growing bedding plants at their nurseries near Battlesbridge in Essex since 1939. We produce an ever-changing range of plants to fit the seasonal needs of garden retailers, always striving to offer a wide range of quality flowering plants with immediate appeal to your customers.
Our product range is very large, making it easy for customers to reach minimum orders, ensuring that top-up orders are sufficient for a garden centre’s needs while avoiding over stocking. In spring we grow over 200 different varieties of pack bedding, more than 100 types of 9 cm basket plants, and in excess of 60 different varieties of Geranium. We grow a large range of vegetable plants grown in both pack and pots these are sold under our exclusive brand: ‘Free Range – chemical free plants’. As spring turns to summer, we change the product emphasis into larger pots and packs, providing instant colourful bedding and perennial plants, to keep driving those impulse sales.
We offer our customers a service that combines modest minimum orders and reliable weekly deliveries. All plants and packs can be priced and bar-coded if required, including the name of the purchasing garden centre. Because we choose to use our own transport for deliveries, our service area is limited to the South East of England:
During the summer we sell our Chilli Festival package with over 15 different Chilli pepper varieties grown in 13cm pots supplied with bespoke labels and POS.
Each year we spend many days visiting the trials of the different plant breeding companies who are all trying to improve the range and quality of the varieties on offer. In recent years we have seen many new Petunia cultivars that had great appeal, but did not fit easily into the colour ranges currently on offer. We have therefore created our ‘Peculiar Petunia’ range, where you will find small quantities of many of these novel varieties in Jumbo 6, to add extra interest to your garden centre bench.
In 1994 we held a ‘Viola and Pansy Festival’ at our own garden centre. The festival was an unprecedented success; not only because of the attention the garden centre received, but also because with the support of the plant breeding companies it placed our business in the forefront of cultivar trialling for this important group of garden plants. The festival has become an annual feature of our calendar and is now recognised as an international horticultural event, which is regularly visited by some of the principal viola and pansy breeders from around the world. Each year we invite our garden centre customers to vote for their favourite varieties. From the votes received, we compile our ‘Festival Favourite’ range of violas grown in 13cm pots; an ever-changing range of the very best varieties from around the world.
