Charles Williams

Dear Customer,

Last year we celebrated our 40th year as Burncoose Nurseries and, in March 2024, we repeated, more or less exactly, the opening party for staff and friends that had occurred in 1984.  

Little did we know that an ancient Betamex tape had filmed (now on youtube) the original opening and been ignored for 40 years. On our website you can see films and the speeches from both events. Not perhaps surprisingly the two speeches have very similar themes.   

Also on our website you can see collages of pictures of all the annual Chelsea flower shows which Burncoose has exhibited in. The style of our exhibits has evolved over the decades and we were delighted with the Gold Medal awarded last year for our huge (100m²) Chelsea stand. This was very capably designed and staged by Cressy Knuckey & Molly Jackson and was our largest Cheslea stand for many years.  

Small businesses like ours are all about people and many characters have worked here over the years. We have tried to show online collages of pictures of how the nursery has developed and the people who helped make this possible. Denis White has worked at Burncoose for 62 years and received his long service award from the Royal Cornwall Show.  

We have also welcomed the many anecdotes and compliments which have been volunteered by our customers in the last year. It is amazing how many people have bought plants from Burncoose for the full 40 years. 

Last year did not, however, turn out to be a successful year financially. The appalling weather for the first 5 months of the year, the uncertainty of the general election, and the real economic downturn which mail order businesses generally are now seeing has led to the first contraction in our turnover after over 20 years of growth.

A few key statistics demonstrate where the main part of the inflationary problem has arisen:-

Minimum Wage 2007         £5.52
Minimum Wage 2024        £11.44
                An increase of 107%

Cost of a standard herbaceous plant in the Burncoose catalogue 2007     £6.50
Cost of a standard herbaceous plant in the Burncoose catalogue 2024    £13.50
                                        An increase of 108%

Our response to the downturn has not been to offer ever greater discounts to our customers to shift stock. We have largely left this to our competitors and have also continued to hold our catalogue and website prices for 2025 with only the most minimal of increases. Our view is that our trees and shrubs will now grow into larger plants which will be even better value for customers. We propagate, grow, and grow on rather more of our own plants than some of our competitors.

Despite all the post-Brexit administrative costs of importing plants from Europe, and the continuing ban on sending plants to our Northern Ireland customers, there is one bit of good news. The recent trade deal with New Zealand means that we now avoid 25% import duty on all the acers and other varieties which we regularly import from that country.

Our 2025 catalogue is, as usual, stuffed with new things. The first early results of our long term plan to propagate many more rhododendron species and Cornish cultivators from seed and cuttings are starting to show up in our extended offering of rhododendrons. We now list 300 separate varieties of camellia and magnolias. As ever, it is the diversity and variety of our mail order offering to customers which has such wide appeal especially when backed up online by mountains of practical advice and informative pictures.

 

Let us hope for a more settled year with low inflation!

 

Kind regards,

 

Charles Williams VMH
Senior Partner, Burncoose Nurseries