Guest Blog: Habitat Aid
Habitat Aid is a small award-winning business based in Somerset. Since 2008 we have worked with a network of small British growers and harvesters, selling and promoting the native plants and wildflower seeds they produce. We also have a great range of heritage fruit trees, which celebrates local distinctiveness.
The business is not just about promoting good messages about ecosystem restoration, but also enabling people to actually do it. In addition to online sales we also offer consultancy services and friendly advice, as well as supplying and delivering larger projects for local government, corporates, NGOs and landscape professionals. We’re also a B Corporation and have astructured giving programme which has donated over £125,000 to smaller UK conservation NGOs.
We offer a good range of UK origin and grown hedge plants, both as bare root and cell grown plants. In the 2024/25 season we supplied the hedge plants for the Soil Association’s project at Woodoaks, for example. This involved delivering both cell grown and bare root hedge plants as well as heritage fruit trees.
Other NGO clients include Earthwatch, whose Tiny Forest planting programme we’re proud to have supplied for the last 4 years:
https://youtu.be/rcHXOoXHSds?feature=shared
These sites require 600 native plug plants, with typically around 20 species represented. They’re typically urban sites, and planted to the Miyawaki method. As all our bare root native plants, we supply these as UK origin and grown, from Plant Healthy certified growers.
Provenance – of seeds as well as plants – is a core part of our messaging.
We love meadow schemes, like this larger scale project for Charlie Bigham at his new factory in Somerset. Here we sowed a locally harvested meadow mix with a cornfield annual nurse:
We’re particularly keen on promoting seed mixes harvested and cleaned from existing meadows. Much of this work is on a smaller scale, like this local conversion of a lawn into a wildflower meadow using seed harvested from a mixed farm outside Langport:
We’re involved in various BNG projects and we’ve had a lot of experience delivering Biodiversity Management Plans for Solar sites across the UK, on both a turnkey and consultancy basis.
This is a site we worked on in Hampshire. Originally poor arable land, it’s now species rich permanent grassland with benefits to biodiversity, carbon capture and flood control.
Our retail offer includes seed packets, which we sell through our website www.BritishWildflowerMeadowSeeds.co.uk . Many of these mixes are sourced from small scale producers – farmers, enthusiasts, ecologists. In addition to the mixes we list here we also offer bespoke promotional seed packets, with quantities ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands. Customers this year have included Aesop and Statkraft. We also had a fun project with Lloyds Bank, supplying them with plants in tubes to give away to staff.
I haven’t even had a chance to talk about our pond plants, including our innovative preplanted coir products…
Anyway, we’re really looking forward to Futurescape. Do come and visit us for a chat and to find out more.
www.BritishWildflowerMeadowSeeds.co.uk
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