Swines Meadow Farm Nursery was started in 2000 by Colin and Karan Ward in a former farmyard on Towngate East, at the edge of Market Deeping. After BSE and foot-and-mouth made arable and stock farming difficult, Colin turned a gardening hobby into a nursery, beginning with gate sales and building it into one of the country's better-known growers of rare and unusual plants. The stock leans towards hardy exotics, tree ferns, bamboos, hostas, ferns, heucheras and shade and woodland plants, much of it propagated on site and hard to find at general garden centres. Colin Ward is a working plantsman who gives talks to garden societies, and the nursery is listed with the Royal Horticultural Society and appears at plant fairs around the region. It opens Monday to Saturday from early March to late December, 10am to 4pm, and offers mail order for many of its plants.
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