Browsing through the pages of the East Anglian Daily Times online as I ate my breakfast, I saw the sad news that John Woods had gone into administration. The name probably doesn't mean much to most people, but they were wholesale growers of ornamental plants for the horticultural trade. The company used to be part of the Nottcutts group before a management buyout in 2007, and has been struggling for a while, since the EADT article said that in October of last year it attempted an agreement to pay its creditors just 49 pence in the pound over five years. Now the administrators are going to auction off its stock of plants, starting very soon. The staff will lose their jobs, the management presumably put their own money into the MBO and have lost that, and the creditors may not get as much as 49 pence. Gardeners and garden centres around the UK will find cherished varieties of plants suddenly unavailable. A sad story.
I went on an outing with Writtle College to visit John Woods when it was still part of Nottcutts. It was a well invested business, with big, shiny, immaculately clean, fully automated glasshouses full of rows of green, glossy, identical shrubs. A few years later I went on an Essex Hardy Plant Society to another wholesale grower, one that had bought the nursery facilities out from a branch of another household name garden centre chain. It raised plants on a far smaller scale than John Woods, in a series of ramshackle polytunnels with slimy patches on the floor and weeds growing in the pots. It went bust some time ago, but all of John Woods' investment did not manage to buy them more than a few years grace.
Towards the end of my time at Writtle I had a meeting with the careers adviser. I don't remember it being at all useful. We discussed commercial ornamental plant production, and I expressed my view that it was not a healthy industry to get into, and he told me irritably that I was talking nonsense. Sorry, mate, but twelve years on it's ex small companies fund manager one, horticultural college careers adviser nil. In my time in the City nobody ever even attempted to float a grower of ornamentals, but if they had it would have struggled to get away on a price earnings ratio of six (market average twelve to fifteen depending on how things were going at the time).
Demand is highly seasonal. Poor old John Woods blamed increasing seasonality of demand as a factor in their downfall. Demand is highly weather dependent. Stock is highly perishable, and doesn't even sit around perishing quietly like a box of bananas on a supermarket shelf, but requires daily nurturing by fairly skilled staff. Demand is linked to the housing cycle, which has been virtually flatlining for a decade. Gardening is no longer trendy. End customers are acutely price sensitive, and people who would not blink twice at paying thirty quid for a haircut or lunch for two in a pub grumble about paying half that for a shrub that took two or three years to grow to its present size, during which time somebody had to think about its welfare every single day. The actual customers are mostly financially flaky, being the nation's network of garden centres which are for the most part small, private, and probably undercapitalized businesses relying on their tea rooms and gift shops to stay afloat, and themselves only a year's bad trading from shutting up shop.
Maybe the UK cannot support medium sized growers any more. Maybe the real specialists will struggle on, the people who eat, breathe and live plants, working long hours and keeping their fixed overheads down. Maybe the mass of the public will be perfectly happy with less choice, filling their ever smaller gardens with a limited palette of reliable plants grown by the Dutch. Maybe the keen hobby gardeners who are interested in plants will increasingly rely on plant stalls and swaps through garden clubs and societies. Or maybe I am being too pessimistic, and John Wood will rise from the ashes. After all, I don't know the whole story as to why it failed. Perhaps it was burdened with more debt than it could carry after the MBO and would be viable with a different financial structure. I hope so. They used to produce some lovely hellebores and daphnes, and unless they can be resurrected then many customers are going to be disappointed over the next couple of years, when the garden magazines tell them to plant 'Jacqueline Postill' and there are no plants to be had in their local garden centre.
No comments:
Post a Comment