My fascination with cacti started in my early teens. One day, I was home from school, feeling under the weather and a bit miserable. During a trip to the Nottingham Garden Centre with my parents, I acquired my very first cactus, a Cereus jamacaru. From that moment, my interest in these intriguing plants took root.

I began my small collection on the windowsill of my bedroom, using it as a growing area. Quickly running out of room, my Dad came up with a solution: a perspex shelf on legs, which I placed on the windowsill. This effectively doubled my available growing area. Over the years it became apparent that a small greenhouse was in order. I can't remember what exactly happened, but I remember us having a lean-to in the back garden, and from memory, I took it over, moving my small collection in. I can't remember exactly how old I was (but it was still in my early teens), my Dad was asked to restore an Aston Martin belonging to Brian Fearn, owner of Abbey Brook Cactus Nursery. On our very first visit to see him, I was amazed to see the vast amount of cacti he had for sale. Incredible. I remember one of the first plants I purchased from him was labelled Rebutia cajasensis. It was covered in bright orange flowers, and they had a lovely smell to them which I always, even to this day, describe as smelling like compost. Needless to say, many more visits to Abbey Brook took place, and alot more cacti were purchased. Brian still has the Aston Martin today, and he was kind enough to show to me in 2023.

Fast forward to when I turned 25. I purchased my first house with my girlfriend, who i'm now married to, and very conveniently it had a nice long back garden. One of the first things i did was to buy myself a small 8ft x 6ft greenhouse. I had so much space available it was great. Obviously I could now drive, and so many visits to various cactus nurseries soon enabled me to fill the little greenhouse, and so the only sensible thing to do was, well, buy another greenhouse! It was a 12ft x 6ft one. As you'd expect, it too was filled to the brim with cacti. I had around 600 in total. However, I started running into big issues with mealy bug and root mealy bug. I just couldn't get rid of them. My fascination with cacti started to disappear. I decided to look for something else to grow, something that (a) were easier to repot, and (b) didn't suffer from mealy bug. For some odd reason, I thought mealy bug only affected cacti. Wrong! Anyhow, I got rid of most of the plants, and began to take an interest in carnivorous plants. Even more intriguing than cacti, they catch and digest flies! Brilliant. The same sort of thing happened. I quickly filled the greenhouses with Sarracenia, Dionaea, Drosera, Pinguicula and Utricularia. During winter, all of the Sarracenia died back. I couldn't believe it, I'd actually killed them all in a short space of time. I ended up throwing them all in the bin. I don't know how many I had, but there were a alot. It wasn't until the following year that I found out they always die back in winter, with normal growth returning the following spring. I'd thrown away a greenhouse full of perfectly healthy Sarracenia! That was a very expensive learning curve. 

A couple of house moves later, to where we are today, and I now grow both cacti and carnivorous plants. I currently have around 350 cacti and around 645 carnivorous plants. My plan is to cut back on the carnivorous plants and focus on increasing the cactus collection again. I'd forgotten how stunning and colourful the flowers on cacti can be. 

Please have a look around the website. It's work in progress as they say.