ABUTILONS.UK
for the enthusiastic amateur & the serious collector
ABOUT US
We are Rob and Joanna, and we operate a small retail nursery called Paddock Plants, based near Southampton in Hampshire. To know more about us, take a look at this page, as there is not much point repeating ourselves here.
But it is perhaps worth spending a moment explaining how ABUTILONS.UK came about, so here goes. It’s all Rob’s fault really (it usually is) and goes back to the dim and distant 1980s, when he was living in a picturesque little stone cottage on the banks of the River Exe just north of Tiverton in Devon. Against the wall of said picturesque cottage he planted an Abutilon (now known as Corynabutilon) Vitifolium and that’s pretty much where a life long love of abutilons began. The fires were stoked by regular visits to Knightshayes Court on the opposite bank of the Exe, which had a conservatory in which grew splendid specimens of Abutilons Canary Bird and Nabob, two old and well respected varieties, with yellow and maroon flowers respectively. They made such an impression on him that he knew that, one day, abutilons were going to be his thing.
KNIGHTSHAYES COURT
Fast forward a couple of decades and Rob and Joanna founded Paddock Plants: for quite a few years there was not an abutilon in sight, other than A. Vitifolium, which we have grown from seed since the start, and a couple of years when we grew the dwarf variety Lucky Lantern Tangerine (it was a PBR variety in the UK at the time but no longer is and we have in fact recently acquired a plant). Then, in casting around for something that we might develop as a specialism, an unexpected opportunity arose that rekindled his enthusiam for the parlour maple.
For many years the achingly beautiful Abutilon Red Tiger had been an object of desire, but a distant one and very much an example of unrequited love, as this exquisite variety appeared to be available only on the other side of the Atlantic. And then, in 2016, the seemingly unattainable was suddenly, well, attainable. There is a story attached to this, but we won’t tell it here. Rob will undoubtedly regale you with it if you come to visit. Suffice it to say that we unexpectedly found ourselves in possession of a goodly quantity of this legendary plant, and that proved the trigger for a renewed enthuasiasm for abutilons in general.
ABUTILON RED TIGER
Our next concern was that there are a fairly limited number of varieties commonly available here in the UK, so, in order to develop a wider range, we looked further afield and bought in some attractive cultivars from Germany and France. Over the last couple of years we have been building up our stock by propagation to levels that will allow us to offer sensible quantities for sale on our website. The trouble is, we have found that as soon as we make a batch available, it sells out within a very short space of time, so maintaining stock levels can be something of a challenge!
So we are still working on building up sufficient stock across a range of varieties, so that we can offer an attractive range of choice to our customers. Currently we are propagating in excess of 50 different cultivars and hope to add more over time. Which pales a bit, mind you, in comparison with the approximately 150 varieties that Eric and Teri Turner have on the accession list for the national collection. Still, we are quite proud to have supplied them with 25 of those.
It may be early days in this new adventure, but we hope that by developing our own collection we can introduce more and more people to the undoubted attractions of the beautiful shrub that is the abutilon. As our collection grows, so will the number of varieties listed on this site, so do come back and see what’s new!