Seed catalogues hold key to unusual choices

18:10 17th February 2009

Gardeners have been advised to trawl through specialist seed catalogues if they want to use their garden and greenhouse to grow some unusual varieties.

There is a "ridiculously large choice of varieties and some genuinely unusual species of both flowers and vegetables" available to gardeners if they are willing to look in the right places, according to the Times.

One of those places is Medywn's of Angle, which is a "specialist in vegetable seed and a prize-winning grower" run by Medwyn Williams.

Another is Simpson's Seeds, which the newspaper recommends as a good source of vegetable seeds with a specialty in chilli peppers.

Stocking over 70 varieties of the spicy plant, the company also offers 90 types of tomato and lives up to its reputation of offering a personal service.

Finally, the article recommends Chiltern Seeds as a company with a variety of plants available.

The Barrow-in-Furness-based company stocks around 4,500 different plants meaning gardeners will have no shortage of choices.

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) operates its own seed distribution service that gardeners from around the world can use to order seeds from RHS sites.