A Brief History of Blagdon Water Gardens

The site on which Blagdon Water Gardens now exists is of great historical and horticultural interest. Once upon a time this 20-acre site in Upper Langford, three miles away from the village of Blagdon in North Somerset was once the site of the ‘kitchen garden’ for a vast and now derelict mansion, Mendip Lodge, up on the hill above the Water Gardens. There are still the old potting sheds intact but fragile and dangerous, away from the public, with one huge wall listed being of particular architectural interest because it was hollow and boilers heated it for forcing various very early greenhouse crops.
Some time after it became a nursery called Mendip Nurseries that sold vegetables, flowers, shrubs and trees directly to the public and was typical of those establishments that preceded the garden centre boom of the early 1970s. You didn’t really know what it was selling until you went inside and then it was only products that were particular to the season, including fruit and vegetables. The shrubs and trees could only be sold in the autumn, winter and early spring months season since all the stock was planted on the nursery and had to be dug up to be sold. The large area of glasshouses on the site producing its cut flowers, glasshouse fruit and potted plants enabled the business to survive the seventies due mainly to the stoical steadfastness of the old owner at the time.
    By 1984 the owner had died and the site was bought by Michael Chivers who, along with his family in Blagdon, had developed a small water garden retail centre that was now out growing the small premises they had surrounding their home in Blagdon village. The idea for a water garden centre had evolved from a comment that a Canadian had made to him during the Second World War. Mike had been one of the few Lancaster bomber rear gunners to survive the war only because he was shot down rather than shot dead. Unfortunately the price was to sit out the war confined in a prisoner of war camp and that is where he met the Canadian. He told him that if he wanted to make a mint after the war he ought to sell fish. Fish? Yeah, goldfish. There was one hell of a profit to be made in goldfish. So amongst dabbling in all manner of other things, he also dabbled in fish after the war and importing them from Mount Parnell Fisheries in the States.
By the late 1970s the main business driving force in the family at this time was Mike’s son Charles who threw his heart and soul into expanding the business and maximising profits. The aim was to not only retail all and every product you needed to create a water garden, but also to manufacture and produce those products, particularly the dry goods. If the product couldn’t be produced on site then he would corner the manufacturer of that product ensuring it was exclusive to “Better Water Garden Products”. This was the birth of Blagdon as owned by Interpet now.
    For ten years business was booming and as it grew more sites were needed for bigger and more ambitious manufacturing and warehouse storage. Henri Studio from the US, who had a developing relationship with Blagdon Water Gardens from 1981 when they were the sole distributors for their fountains and statuary in the UK, had a large corner of the site at Mendip Nurseries where the first Henri fountains were produced in the UK. Inevitably with these two businesses manufacturing on this one site that was also ostensibly a retail site as well, storage space soon became a premium. Since the manufacturing space was in an old greenhouse, health and safety factors were also a major consideration. So by the beginning of the 1990s Blagdon Water Gardens combined with Henri Studio (now calling its British branch Henri Studio Blagdon) and bought some large warehouse and manufacturing space in Highbridge, Somerset.
Within two short years, with the development of some very profitable lines like the Blagdon Amphibious pump, Blagdon Water Garden Products, as they were now called, were again looking for larger premises. Henri needed the space too and in fact the storage area next to the motorway on the M5 became quite a local conversation piece with acres of stone ornaments jam packed in rows, ten to fifteen feet high. So the next move for Blagdon was to Bridgwater. What better place for Blagdon Water Gardens to buy than the factory that had been commissioned to build the Amphibious pump, the Myson premises in Bridgwater? This was a huge site and is now the home of Interpet.
Although it is not entirely relevant to this article, it was at this stage that the only markets left for expansion where in Europe and it had seemed at the time that the best way to break into it was to buy an established company and use that as a conduit for products from the UK. Charles eventually bought a company called KFS in Germany, which unfortunately was not as buoyant as it first had seemed. It had specialised in large fountain and water garden products, highly engineered and very expensive. With a lot of unfinished business on the books (in places like Iraq of all places, which was just being stuffed by the Americans in the first Iraq war) and some new investments in premises, KFS turned out to be heavily in debt. Also being taken over by a British company was not very much to the employees’ liking. The net result was that Charles’s business venture in Europe just seemed to grind to a halt. Henri Studio products managed to make a market for themselves but it seemed to Charles that an injection of funds was what was required to get the water garden product business moving in Europe.
There had been and still was a major recession hitting many businesses in the UK. This had been going on since the late eighties and in the early nineties, was still going on, but it had not seemed to affect the water garden trade. In fact gardening and anything to do with it, including water gardening, was the new ‘sexy thing’. But investors in booming businesses can be excused for being a little bit jittery and although Charles could find plenty of people to give him advise, no real investment in the business was coming from anyone for a while.
Determination was certainly not missing from Charles main characteristics and he eventually managed to secure a hefty injection of funds but also a little more than he bargain from Syn Chemicals, the major compost and garden chemical manufacturers. They were keen to take over the company but on their own terms and rigorously put the business through vigorous a shake up, sacking some of the reliable hardworking family members and faithful retainers. Once in control but after only a few months in the driving seat they saw the annual sales figures dip on the usual winter ‘big dipper’ style dive that most water garden retailers are used to, and they panicked. It was Christmas 1995, the new owners alerted the banks and then the Receivers were called in. This was the beginning of a slow end to what had been an incredibly successful business. The assets were called in and sold off including the five smaller stores dotted around the midlands and the southwest. Ubbink, the Dutch water garden product manufacturer keen to get hold of the Amphibious pump, bought the major portion of the wholesale part of the business. Less than two years later it was sold to Interpet who intended to make much more use of the old premises in Bridgewater.
Meanwhile the Receivers, K, P and G, ran the site at Upper Langford whilst the accounts were worked out. When it transpired that everyone that was owed money was paid and the Receivers managed to make a very substantial profit just by running the business in a freewheeling neutral mode, it is seemed obvious that that the call for liquidation had been pointless. There was still money to be made in water gardens. Once the site was on sale, a local Cheddar garden centre snapped it up, but within another two years the business was bankrupt. Local rumour came up with innumerable reasons, but there no doubting the truth that business was still thriving at Blagdon Water Gardens. It just needed a steady hand at the helm and not in the till.

THE SMITHS TAKE OVER
One of the big success stories in the horticultural world of North Somerset was the expansion of Wheatfields Nurseries of Churchill. This had blossomed on the back of rapid expansion of the DIY shed chains, particularly Sainsbury’s Homebase. Wheatfields propagated and grew on popular shrubs and perennials in numbers that make the mind boggle. Installing all the latest automatic potting and watering equipment, they were in an ideal position to supply any quantity on demand form their huge nursery. Three brothers, Roger, David and Gordon Smith, who had taken over their father’s small market garden business, ran the business. They had seen there was niche in the market for providing good quality high performance plants and launched themselves headlong into the fray to fulfil the demand and they struck a pot of gold; they had been in the right place at the right time.
The success of the wholesale side of the business then tempted them into the retail side of the trade. A nearby small garden centre needed some new owners and a bit of ‘t.l.c’. This was the break into retail they had been looking for that might prove to be an effective outlet for excess stock. Acquiring a garden centre started a habit that ended in a collection of four and the site at Blagdon Water Gardens was the third on the list.
Their bank manager had ‘flagged it up’ as coming onto the market and though it had potential garden centre outlet, but that was soon ruled out when the Planning Authorities laid down that they would only allow the current style of business to continue. They had been hardened by the efforts of the liquidators and subsequent owners to apply for permission for new housing developments and even a Tesco store. The liquidators had even retained and laid covenants on part of it to ensure that it could not return back to horticultural or agricultural land, but the Smiths when they bought the site, managed to acquire it all and once again it was one complete site. This was 1999.
For some time the Smiths brothers let the site cruise along with very little investment or development whilst they got the feel of what this new water garden business was all about. Then came 2003 when all of a sudden the UK garden trade was being swamped with over produced trees from the Dutch. Wheatfield’s big customers where looking greedily at huge short term savings and followed their instincts to the cheap European markets. The Smiths brothers had seen it coming several months before and wound down the nursery and started to invest their time and efforts in their retail outlets. The Nursery had been thriving for 8years and had served to set them on a secure footing in the retail end of the business.