Every year at the Garden Museum Spring Plant Fair, we gather expert plant growers and specialist nurseries from around the country to sell the best garden plants you’ll find in London.
From shade specialists to plants for pollinators, meet the growers and pick their brains on what will flourish in your garden, balcony or allotment.
This year’s fair will also feature talks and activities all included in your ticket price so you can learn more expert tips for gardening in the city.
Programme
Cooking Workshop: Root & Leaf
10.15 – 11.15am, 12 – 1pm
In this one-hour workshop you will make a beautiful spring salad, using techniques and recipes that make the most of the root and leaf of some easy to grow at home vegetables such as radish. This workshop will be a mixture of hands on and demo by the instructor, the Garden Museum’s Food Learning Officer Ceri.
Register to attend this free workshop: Cooking Workshop Registration
Tips and Tricks for Making Your Own Compost
11am
Join this talk to learn how to create your own healthy soil, from identifying what your compost is missing to discussing the perfect ratio of brown to green and highlighting the pitfalls and mistakes so often made when using organic waste.
Seed and Sprout Swap with Herboo
11.30am
Did you plant too many tomato plants? Have an abundance of marigold seeds from last years harvest? Join Herboo and likeminded green fingered people to swap not only your seeds and sprouts but tips and stories.
Sign up and label your seeds from 10am, ready to start swapping at 11.30am.
Susanna Grant on Planting in the Shade
12pm
Whether your whole garden, courtyard or balcony is cast in shade, or you simply have a window box on a shadowy sill, Susanna Grant will inspire you to transform the space with lush and interesting planting that looks good (and is beloved by wildlife) all year round. She will help you understand shade so that you can light up dark spaces, green small balconies and unloved corners with biodiverse perennial planting. Susanna’s book Shade is released on 5 April.
Growing for Bees Workshop
1.30pm
Join this free workshop to learn not only how to maximise the bee potential of your garden but also the basics for keeping bees in an urban environment. This hour long workshop will take you through each stage of creating and maintaining habitats for honey bees and all pollinators to thrive.
Register to attend this free workshop: Growing for Bees Workshop Registration
Errol Fernandes on Climate Planting
2pm
London generates its own microclimate with the centre of London being up to 10C warmer than rural areas around it. Gardeners are often the first to notice the changes, plants that are able to overwinter without protection for the first time or others that have grown healthily for years now suffering from drought. Climate change does present us with opportunities to grow some exciting new plants that we might not have previously considered. In this talk, Errol addresses the move towards sustainability and what we need to consider when growing species that are more resistant to increased temperatures and reduced rainfall?
Stalls
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Herboo
Herboo
Herboo is all about making a garden, anywhere. Whatever your age, your space, whether you are growing indoors, a window box, terrace or garden beds. We select our seeds thinking about growing in the city and provide all the information and support you need to grow with ease.
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Hello There Linda
Hello There Linda
Founded by Susanna Grant, in a small Hackney courtyard this wonderful shop sells shade-loving perennials and lushly planted boxes for sills, balconies and yards
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Glendon Farm Nurseries
Glendon Farm Nurseries
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Moore & Moore Plants
Moore & Moore Plants
Specialising in choice, unusual, and rare plants for shady places, they also have an interesting and select collection of plants which will attract pollinators to your garden.
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The Kew Plantsman
The Kew Plantsman
Professional plantsman Matthew Spratt will be selling rare and unusual perennials, shrubs, grasses, bamboo, species fuchsia and potted herbs.
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John Cullen Gardens
John Cullen Gardens
John Cullen Gardens grow healthy, strong plants, which are all tended to by hand at their nursery in beautiful rural Lincolnshire. They specialise in plants for pollinators, and fine scented and edible plants.
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Nobottle Nursery
Nobottle Nursery
A Northamptonshire nursery selling a range of herbaceous perennials, fuchsias and seasonal stocks of sweet peas, bedding plants, vegetable plants and young perennial plants.