The Great Survivor

For 140 years, the pioneering nursery McBean’s Orchids has set the gold standard ard and, today, it continues against great odds to create the finest blooms. Mark Griffiths celebrates its extraordinary achievements

EVEN in childhood, Rose Armstrong knew of McBean’s Orchids, at Cooksbridge near Lewes. Enthusiastic orchid-growers, her grandparents often bought plants from the firm, but it wasn’t until 1998, after moving to East Sussex, that she began to frequent the nursery and fell in love with it.

Of the countless visits that followed, some were devoted to entertaining her children. ‘Imagine,’ she says, ‘a tropical jungle hidden under glass on the south coast. We had four boys to keep happy and going to McBean’s on a rainy Saturday was top of the list.’ On other occasions, she devoted herself to the plants, captivated by their beauty, fascinated by their history and awed by the fact that they’d been grown on this same site for well over a century. So it went, happily, until the day when she arrived at McBean’s only to learn that this would have to be her last visit ever.

‘I’d no idea until I turned up and they told me,’ Mrs Armstrong recalls, ‘but, the very next day, the nursery was closing for good. I couldn’t comprehend how such a tradition could just come to a stop. How could there be no future for these orchids that were so celebrated and highly valued and a unique part of our gardening and cultural heritage? I thought: surely they ought to be preserved as a collection—one that it would be an education to visit as well as a joy? We’d do it for important artworks, so why not for these living national treasures? It seemed as if fate, rather than chance, had led me to McBean’s that day. I decided that its closure was a catastrophe that mustn’t happen.’

There was only one way to effect this rescue: in November 2014, Mrs Armstrong and her husband, Martin, became the owners of Britain’s oldest surviving orchid nursery.