Why I started The English Potted Plant Co.
If you walk into the grand drawing-room of an English country house like Chatsworth, you might expect to see towering, exotic orchid arrangements or vastly expensive Mayfair floral displays. Instead, you are far more likely to find something a terracotta pot of white zonal geraniums sitting casually on a the mantlepiece or a small Cyclamen ‘Coum’ in a Herend jardienere.
My fascination with humble plants in high places was cemented many years ago whilst working at the home of landscape architect Elizabeth Banks. I remember seeing her Paperwhite bulbs nestled in bleached coral from winter holidays Bahamas in an old crystal bowl and thinking “my God how stylish” and was completely and forever enchanted.
David Hicks, that precise arbiter of taste, brought potted daffodils in old clay pots straight into his home. King Louis XIV had citrus trees from his Orangery potted up into solid silver tubs for the ballroom and the Duchess of Beaufort loved to bring her botanical specimens from the greenhouse into Badminton. It’s rooted in the centuries-old tradition of bringing the scent and colour of the garden indoors from estate walled gardens and greenhouses. It is a look that has always fascinated me, a culture that is so confident that it can defy the ‘rules’ and be playful and bold. It’s also has an audacity which is at the very heart of ‘English Style’ and something I love so much I’ve built a company - the English Potted Plant Co - directly inspired by this floral insouciance.
But there is more to why I do what I do:
After university, my first career was in urban regeneration, an industry where I worked from the late Eighties to the late Nineties. Urban regeneration grew out of places like Portland, Oregan and was a political need to create new employment in regional areas which had lost their industry and often their souls and their purpose along with this economic decline. They were called ‘depressed areas’ because they and the people who lived there, often were. It was a grand experiment of bold public and private investment targeted at repurposing and revitalising existing buildings and infrastructure to attract new life and it became a catalyst for much of our urban landscape today.
During those years, I worked on the ravaged eastern city fringes of Cape Town, destroyed by the bulldozing of District Six during apartheid’s forced removals, the decaying canals of the Lee Valley and London Docklands, the crumbling pottery stacks of the Stoke-on-Trent vanishing pottery empires and alongside the ghosts of the British Navy at Sheerness Port on the Isle of Sheppey.
What all these projects taught me over and over again was a fundamental truth about culture and history – that the best way to save something was to keep it humble, functional and authentic.
Human nature is remarkably adept at sensing when something is ersatz and inauthentic. When a place, a building or a design is a little bit desperate, when it is trying too hard, it frightens us away. I learned that if you want to genuinely change something, you have to work with what you already have. You have to understand its evolution and what it meant to people who lived and worked there, how they lived there with their traditions, their routines and their symbols.
And this is where The English Potted Plant Co. began. It was born out of a long-held belief that our economic history matters, that our traditions and skills are worth preserving and that everyday beauty should be accessible to everyone - what I think of as the privilege of the everyday. It goes beyond the platitudes of just ‘support local’ or ‘Buy British’ and focuses more on what is at the heart of its character - the artisanal skill and the manufacturing prowess which created them in the first place.
When I source antique vessels and repurpose them as indoor planters, I am not trying to preserve them in aspic like frozen museum pieces, I want them in everyday use. I want the owners to know where they were made, how they were made and why they matter. The UK was a global leader in both industrial manufacturing and the design of ceramics, and we still have an exceptional pool of skilled talent and innovation which is increasingly marginalised and struggling. By celebrating these vessels which I use for my potted plants, we remind ourselves of that legacy.
But it’s not just about the pots: Somewhere along the way, modern interiors lost their confidence with indoor plants. We became flooded with ubiquitous, weirdly green, plastic-looking “houseplants” which are bred and chosen almost exclusively because they are low-maintenance with their disposable mass-produced leaves that rarely offer scent, flowers or personality. I find it so extraordinary that our gardens are renowned and we are a nation of gardeners and yet we have so often settled for plant mediocrity in our homes!
The English Potted Plant Co. has slowly been growing over the past six years and is my way of recycling the past to remain relevant today. In a modern world dominated by anodyne tech and the cheap commodification of everything, choosing something with a history is to preserve our identity and to re-affirm that we are not just the vassals of billionaires and populist bigotry. It is about choosing seasonal charm over disposable convenience and celebrating the exceptionalism of our cultural and horticultural heritage and the privilege of the everyday.
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