The staff at Gates are a special breed. They wear fleece jackets and have a supernatural ability to find the exact type of plant you didn’t know you needed. “This,” they’ll say, pointing to a sad-looking fern, “will thrive in the toilet of a Scottish castle.” And weirdly, they’re right. They also have the patience of saints. I once asked a young man if a lavender bush was “bee-friendly”. He looked me dead in the eye and said, “Ma’am, bees are obsessed with it.” That’s the level of commitment you get here.
They never judge you for buying a plant just because the pot is pretty. They see you struggling to lift a 40-litre bag of topsoil and they just nod. They know. They’ve seen it all – the overwatered orchids, the “I’ll prune it later” lies. They are the therapists of the horticultural world.
