Cottage industry

In the first instalment of a new series on the best of Britain's nurseries, Clare Foster visits Bluebell Cottage Gardens and Nursery in Cheshire and meets its energetic owner Sue Beesley.

Buying plants is a national obsession, and never before have they been so accessible. Online suppliers, garden centres and DIY stores offer an ever-increasing range of reasonably priced plants, and even supermarkets are selling bargain box balls and 'Hidcote' lavender by the shelf load. With temptation everywhere, it's easy to get sucked in, but sometimes it pays to be more discerning about the plants you buy.

Here in Britain, we're lucky enough to have some of the best specialist nurseries in the world, where you'll find a much wider range of interesting varieties - not just those at their seasonal peak, as in most garden centres - most of which have been raised at the nursery and properly acclimatised to British weather. Some of these nurseries also have beautiful gardens to visit, where you can see the plants in situ before buying them for your own garden.

In this new series, I make a case for the nurseries that can offer the best all-round visiting experience, with good-quality, home-grown plants as well as beautiful gardens to inspire; most of them offer mail-order services, too. Bluebell Cottage Gardens and Nursery is tucked away down leafy lanes only a few miles from. Warrington and the industrial landscape of the Mersey. There has been a nursery and garden here for 25 years, but it is only in the last six or seven years that it has placed itself firmly on the horticultural map, thanks to the unfailing energy and enthusiasm of new owner Sue Beesley. Previously a joint owner of an IT business with her husband, Sue first entered the gardening world with the BBC Gardener of the Year competition in 2006, which she won, and this propelled her into buying the rundown nursery the following year. 'The first three years were an incredibly steep learning curve,' she says. 'We arrived in February and the garden was due to open for the National Garden Scheme in April. I was surrounded by thousands of dead plants; it was absolutely terrifying. I was half exhilarated, half exhausted, out in the garden at 7am every morning studying the plants, looking things up on Google and desperately trying to work out what everything was before the visitors arrived.'

Undaunted, Sue, who is the type of woman who runs triathlons in her spare time, took the bull by the horns and threw herself wholeheartedly into improving the nursery and redesigning the two-acre garden. The neat wooden nursery beds are now stuffed full of desirable herbaceous plants, many of which have been propagated at the nursery. 'I started off by buying stock in to build up the range, but now I propagate about 60 per cent myself, knowing exactly how long it will take to produce a viable, sellable plant from cuttings or seed.' But she also has an eye for what works commercially; she is not averse to buying in the popular favourites that disappear from the sales tables as soon as they are put out. 'I don't want to be too purist,' she says. 'I'm not interested in novelty - I specialise in plants that we know are reliably hardy here in Cheshire. I want these plants to really thrive and to still be looking fabulous in several years' time.' To illustrate her point, she takes me round the garden, showing me evidence of her tried-and-tested plants, which do indeed look fabulous in combinations that she has put together herself. 'I love bringing people out here to show them what the plants really look like in a garden setting,' says Sue. 'They are often amazed at something that is knee-high in the nursery, such as the eupatorium, which can be nearly two metres in the garden. This is a real garden. We do all the gardening ourselves and it's on a scale that people can identify with and pick up ideas. It can show them how to group plants, how to space them and use them in design.'

Sue took the original bones of the garden and improved things immeasurably by expanding the modestly proportioned, straight-edged borders into larger, curvaceous planting areas. Into these capacious beds went her stock plants, which have matured into gently flowing drifts and mounds. And to complement the new curves, the rod-straight yew hedge that runs across the garden has recently been clipped into gentle curves, too. 'I'm a little bit averse to a straight view with an urn at the end,' says Sue. 'I don't want to see straight through the garden, I want the sense of a journey, I want people to wonder what's around the next corner.'

True to her ethos, the plants on show in the garden are her stalwarts. Growing robustly here in the north of the country, these are the plants that her customers can't get enough of, the ones that look good for months on end and come back year after year: Geranium 'Orion', for example, periwinkle blue against a drift of blond Stipa tenuissima; and Hemerocallis 'Corky', an early-flowering day lily with pale-yellow flowers that have maroon stripes down the back to mirror their dark stems. In addition to the designed borders, Sue is building up a collection of thalictrums with around 30 species and cultivars, which she hopes may become a National Collection at some point. 'I love thalictrums,' she says. 'They're airy and dainty, and they come in all sizes. In general, they like a quiet life, with dappled shade and moist, woodlandy soil. My personal favourite is Thalictrum delavayi var. decorum, which has delicate open flowers and fantastic, ferny foliage.'

For Sue, the learning curve is certainly not as steep as it was when she took over Bluebell Cottage, but it is continuing. Having achieved an RHS Diploma in Horticulture, she has now stepped into the rarefied world of the floral marquee, exhibiting at Tatton Park, Southport and Malvern, with Chelsea firmly in her sights. But it is at the nursery that she is most at home, and this is most in evidence as she finishes our tour of the garden, pointing out the bursting red-and-black seedheads of Paeonia mlokosewitschii. 'I grew these from seed and five years on they've flowered for the first time,' she says with pride. 'Now I have my own source of sustainable seed. This is really what it's all about.'