As a young girl, Lisa Wesley was obsessed with plants. “I’d spend hours with my dad looking for wildflowers in the local woods and, when I was about seven, I got hold of some books and began teaching myself all their names.” Then her aunt gave her a little cactus, and soon Lisa had a collection of pocket-money purchases that filled the windowsills of her family home.
Some four decades on, it is no surprise to find that Lisa is running one of the most interesting nurseries in the country. Growild offers a fascinating selection of rare and unusual perennial species, many of them from Japan, China and the Himalayas.
She has a large selection of hardy impatiens, begonias, Cirsium, Taraxacum and Saxifraga stolonifera, and grows so many ornamental members of the nettle family that she is currently applying to be recognised as a National Collection holder of hardy Asian Urticaceae, examples of which include Pilea and Elatostema.
Everything is grown from her own seed, cuttings and divisions (or, very occasionally, seed from trusted people who own plants she doesn’t yet have in her collection) to strictly vegan standards, on the former farm in Ayrshire where she has lived with her partner Andrew Blackwood since 2014.
It seems like an obvious and inevitable outcome for a self-confessed ‘plant nerd’, but Lisa’s journey to this point in her life has been far from straightforward. As a neurodiverse individual, Lisa found it impossible to engage with mainstream academic education and instead spent her childhood and teenage years obsessively drawing and painting.
She went on to become a professional artist, working in performance and installation as well as paper-based practices, but gradually found that the pressure to promote herself and her work became unbearable.
“By this point I was living in Glasgow with Andrew, and the Glasgow Botanic Gardens was just a ten-minute walk from our house. I used to spend a lot of time there looking at the plants and taking pictures,” she says.
“I started reading plant books again, especially anything by [US plant hunter] Daniel Hinkley, and I began to collect plants for the first time since my childhood. It felt like I was rediscovering myself.”
Lisa found she was particularly drawn to the pure Asian species. “I’m a minimalist at heart. In my art I always try to distil things down to their purest form, to take
away all the unnecessary elements, and it’s the same with plants. The species are just so much more elegant than all those ‘shouty’ cultivars that plant breeders produce.”
What started as a hobby soon, in Lisa’s words, got out of hand. With only a concrete yard behind her home, in 2012 she rented a semi-derelict plot of land nearby where she could keep her expanding collection.
Then, to fund the purchase of the rare species that she coveted, Lisa began to sell some of the plants she had already propagated. The business may have begun almost by accident, but word spread among her fellow plant nerds, who couldn’t get enough of her pink dandelions and fancy thistles, and it rapidly skyrocketed.
“Andrew and I knew we had to move to find more space, and we were happy to get out of the city, but it took us a couple of years to find the right place.” In fact, when Andrew first showed her the property details of their current home, Lisa was so convinced it was the wrong place that she resisted even visiting it.
“The farm was basically a blank canvas,” she says. “An overgrazed field, horribly tortured hedges, and a house I didn’t like the look of. But there were also five acres of woodland and the minute I walked into them I felt a strong sense that I had to protect them.”
Nine years on, a lot has changed. The scalped field has gradually reverted to wildflower meadow and the hedges have relaxed beautifully. The air now thrums with bee and insect activity, and 19 more species of bird have been recorded in recent years. Lisa and Andrew have welcomed their soaring wildlife population, from damselflies to swallows, with one significant exception: deer.
“They just keep eating my fancy dandelions,” says Lisa. Andrew, who gladly gave up his previous job in arts administration to run the office side of the nursery, is currently working his way around the perimeter of their land installing deer-proof fences. The collection of rare plants Lisa has built up is just too precious to risk it being turned into a takeaway supper for marauding ruminants.
Nettles, umbels and thistles all thrive naturally in the heavy clay soil here. Other things, including Lisa’s precious collection of rare, Chinese, high-alpine plants, which can’t cope with such rich living, are grown in raised beds, where they appreciate the free-draining conditions.
Lisa will find a way of growing anything that catches her attention. “I think I have
a good eye for plants and I’m a big foliage person. I can look at a little woodland
plant and fully lose myself in its detail for five minutes at a time.”
She knows that some traditional gardeners would class many of the plants on her sales list as weeds. “I would just say to them, don’t let whole groups of plants be tarnished by the same brush. They don’t all behave like the notorious ones, and so many are really beautiful, garden-worthy plants."
The full version of this feature appeared in Gardens Illustrated magazine. Subscribe here