Postgate Plants |
Postgate Plants Postgate House, Castleton, Whitby YO21 2ET |
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Postgate Plants |
Postgate Plants Postgate House, Castleton, Whitby YO21 2ET |
| Welcome | Alpines | Herbaceous | Grasses | Herbs | Tender | Find Us |
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Postgate Plants is a small, family run plant nursery. It was started as a means of disposing of surplus plants, grown from seed or cuttings. Moira Thomson has a passion for propagation and grows only what she wants to - selling her surplus to the public. The installation of a mist propagator in 1999 meant that there was a high success rate and far too many young plants for the garden. We also receive surplus seed from the Alpine Garden Society and Royal Horticultural Society. If germination rates are good and the plants do well in the garden, these are also available for sale. Often the plants on offer are not listed in plant encylopaedia, so we decided to build up this web site to catalogue them. | 
Campanula lactiflora |
| Postgate House is situated in Castleton
in the Upper Esk Valley in the North York Moors National Park. We
are at 700 feet above sea level and our garden is on a one-in-four north-west-facing
slope - facing the prevailing westerly winds! To the south of us
is a house surrounded by mature Scots Pines, ensuring that the majority
of the garden doesn't get sunlight in winter and the rest only sees the
sun in the afternoon!
Our north-west garden boundary has a seven foot high Leylandii hedge which filters the wind in the herbaceous border but keeps the sun off it. Our soil has been cultivated for many years and hence is a neutral loam on top of clay. We get frosts down to -10c - not as severe as other parts of the country but more frequent. As a guide, we predict our last frost for tender plants to be the "last full moon in May", though this can fall in June depending on the lunar calendar. Normally we have high winds in September that burn the leaves off exposed plants and the first frosts are due at the beginning of October. We get about 30 inches of rain a year. |
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We have a very simple means of selling plants:
The plant tables are located by the roadside outside the stables, fenced off to prevent the sheep from eating them! The plants all have named labels (colour coded for hardiness) and there is a description of preferred location, size, flowering time and colour. There is an honesty box built in to an old pig feeding hole in the wall and ask our customers to put their money in. It normally works well except on Bank Holidays! Carrier bags are available to take the plants home. We are happy to give advice (and change) to our customers, though they sometimes have to hunt us out first! Because of our situation, our plants are often later than most nurseries as we do not force them and they come into growth in their own time. One thing we can guarantee is that is a plant is marked hardy (especially in the spring) it must be or it would be dead! |
Plant Catalogue
Range of plants
Because this is a small nursery, we do
not carry vast stocks of any one plant. We prefer to have a wide
variety of plants and, anyway, I get fed up of potting on more than 30
plants of one variety! We started specialising in alpines but realised
that we had many more interesting plants to offer, so have diversified
into different areas. We have a few, different, tender plants but
do not have the space to overwinter many.
Click on the category below for more details