Evolution Plants is launched with a mission
“to give gardeners better, more interesting, more exciting garden plants”
Having swapped a successful 15 year career as a City banker to become a 21st century plant explorer, Tom Mitchell has launched Evolution Plants with the aim of offering discerning plants people and gardeners around the world a fantastic range of new and exciting temperate plants that they have never grown before.
Over the last five years Tom (right), who has a degree in Natural Sciences, and a PhD in tropical rainforest biology, has travelled almost every continent, finding and photographing some of the world’s most fascinating plant species, collecting seeds and painstakingly propagating, cultivating and trialling them at his 13 acre nursery near Bath.
Tom is now ready to launch Evolution Plants, which offers a growing list of exciting plants from South African bulbs to trees from the temperate rainforests of SW China, from the long flowering and easy to grow, to the fleet-flowered and high-maintenance. Many of the plants have never been seen in the UK before. Many are rare, some are unique to Evolution Plants and all are interesting.
Although the nursery is open to visitors by appointment only, its highly informative web site www.evolution-plants.com offers gardeners a chance to buy plants which can be shipped almost anywhere in the world. The website is unique, containing a vast amount of original content, written by Tom, about each of the plants on sale.
Tom said, “Evolution Plants aims to become the most exciting online destination in the world for plantsmen and keen gardeners. What we do that other specialist nurseries do not, is to reach out to keen gardeners across the globe who are currently limited to a very restricted palette of plants or manufactured and heavily marketed ‘new’ hybrids. There’s a whole world of temperate plants out there that most gardeners are simply unaware of. Our ambition is to inspire enthusiasm for better, more interesting, more exciting garden plants”
Tom also believes that the nursery and its customers can aid the conservation of biological diversity by cultivating plants that are threatened in the wild.
He said, “Many of the places I visit around the world to collect seed are under threat from development, which will eventually destroy the habitats of many plant species and send them to extinction. I have no power to halt this destruction but by collecting seed and cultivating it we can use our gardens as artificial arks in which some of these vanishing species can be preserved.”