How Christinas started

When I was growing up, my grandmother had a wild, unkempt garden with tall grasses and wildflowers, fruiting trees, and native hedging to mark the boundary.

My mother, however, had a very lovely, cultivated garden with a nod to a cottage garden style.

This has given me a love for both types of gardens, as well as forests because I spent so much time in them during my childhood.  I always thought when I grew up I'd live in a glade within the middle of a forest...

However, like most people I ended up stuck working very long hours at a desk and forgot about the things I loved doing and seeing.

After I finally quit working in London and learned to relax again, I noticed on my long walks around forests that I was coming out 'clean'.  I remember from childhood avoiding wearing yellow because I would be covered in bugs, or I'd be sticky from aphid dew, and I would certainly have spotted many different types of birds, insects, reptiles, and rodents.  But as an adult, I was noticing I wasn't bumping into bugs or having to remove them from my hair, and the forest was so quiet.  I started to wonder where all the bugs had gone.

On moving to Suffolk, I finally had a garden; small but manageable for someone who didn't have much gardening experience.  I spent the first year sitting and watching what happened in the garden.  No wildlife was present; even the earth was barren.  My grandmother had always enjoyed sitting in her windows watching the birds, which is something I also love to do.  So my first thought was: How do I get birds and bugs into this garden?

That's where my journey began: experimenting with seeds, cuttings, and planting trees, bushes, shrubs and flowers.  If I didn't get it right, I would deep dive into researching about soil, different plants, bugs and birds to find out where I was going wrong.

Moving to Suffolk also highlighted a lack of wildflower fields that I used to enjoy as a child, mostly in nature reserves.  So along with the birds and bugs, I wanted to encourage wildflowers to grow in amongst my cultivated plants and to leave some of the garden a bit wilder, in effect bringing my grandmother's and mother's styles of gardening together.

I've gone from an empty garden to one that is alive with nature, and it didn't take much to achieve it.

I now sell a small supply of seeds grown by me, as well as from local UK farms, in the hope that others will join the cause and spread some wildflower love around their own gardens.

The wildflowers sold through my website originate from stock grown in the UK.  The seed is packed, mixed and distributed in the UK only.  You can be confident that you are buying native UK Wild Flower Seeds to produce Native UK Wild Flower beds in your garden.