I’ve always found that the appeal of any nursery is boosted if you know there’s an on-site garden where you can see how plants offered for sale will grow and fit together. This makes Norwell Nurseries near Newark in Nottinghamshire, established by Andrew and Helen Ward in 1994, a particular favourite of mine. Set behind a row of terraced cottages on a heavy clay frost pocket, an unprepossessing, overgrown field has been developed by the couple into a superb nursery and an impressively diverse two-acre garden. They’ve manipulated the difficult conditions to their advantage using skill and sustained physical effort.
“The weather extremes here are perhaps our biggest challenge, and we’ve had more of them than ever in recent years; winter is
