The Dig Potted History!

Thank you for joining our email list.  The newsletter goes out every Thursday. However I didn’t want you to dive into our Digger’s world and not understand the back story.

So here is a little information about Antony and I. We set up Silver Grey Foliage on a whim in August 2019.  On a whim? Well, sort of.  A friend asked me (Rebecca) to do her wedding flowers and, of course, my natural question was to ask how many of the flowers I could grow myself.  I thought at the time that I was an ‘OK’ gardener.

Clearly the answer was that we couldn’t grow much (with our limited experience) in time for that August: there is nothing like a short timescale for wedding plants to get yourself in planning order. This didn’t stop me researching the things that Becky wanted to have in her bouquet which included Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus was then and is now our first love, along with other foliage and floral fillers.  However, as it is a seasonal crop and a flower grower can’t just work in winter, we started growing and selling flowers with a real desire to grow, work with and more importantly offer you genuinely seasonal, genuinely environmentally low carbon flowers.

When we started, I realised that my ‘OK gardener’ skills were exactly that - OK! And if I wanted to grow at any scale there was so much to learn.  For a start, the flowers that we wanted to grow for you had to be different.  They had to stand out between Interflora’s Gerberas and Freddie’s Flowers letterbox Crysanthemums.  Our flowers and foliage had to have charm, reasonable longevity, beauty and perfume.  Our foliage needed to add texture to your door wreath and interest beyond the flat green of standard florist buys.

Antony and I had/have our work cut out for us, especially as we are learning and literally growing this whilst working our other jobs and bringing up 2 children who are often less than thrilled by the process.

Now? In 2021, we’re about to enter our third Christmas and it looks so, so different to the first one. For a start, the vast majority of the foliage and textures used in your wreaths and wreath kits will be grown by us, right here in Leeds.

So what about this Newsletter then?  Well, in the newsletter I tell you about what we are growing and how we are going it.  We share tips that we have learnt/are learning that are helpful hopefully for your own garden, no matter how big or small.  We tell you about the flowers that are in season and share ‘gardening verbs’ as a mix of skills sharing and wellbeing reflection.

Clearly we also tell you about what you can buy from us for your friends and family too.  Some of it is available to post (especially over Christmas), but mainly for delivery within Leeds postcodes.

So there you go, a little more about us. And what you can look forward to in our weekly email.

Please do hit reply and tell me a little about you and what you’d like to know.  I make a note of all requests and at some point will include them in the newsletter, so keep looking out for them.

Rebecca