Value garden centre Riverside in Hockley is celebrating its first 12 months since joining the Cherry Lane family. A huge transformation has seen the garden centre grow – its interior retail space is now double in size, the plant area has been expanded by 30%, and new departments and product ranges introduced to enhance the shopping experience. 

The anniversary is being marked with an in-store competition for customers to win a £150 shopping voucher.

Cherry Lane specialises in high-quality, great value gardening products and is passionate about beautiful plants at amazing prices. Cherry Lane has created a larger horticulture offering at Riverside Garden Centre to offer customers a vast choice of the finest plants, shrubs and trees, as well as compost and aggregates, outdoor living such as garden furniture, solar lighting, home and gifts, all at spectacular Cherry Lane prices. A new Scallywags pet department has also been created.

While updates have been made around the garden centre, the much-loved Garden Room Café remains the same. Riverside’s well-established basket and container operation has also been continued, which complements the Grown by Us range cultivated in nurseries at four of Cherry Lane’s other garden centres. Riverside grows hundreds of plants for bespoke customer orders and general sale in the garden centre.

Cherry Lane retained all existing employees when it acquired Riverside. Currently, 60 staff work across the garden centre and café, including 15 new team members who have been recruited in the past year.

To mark 12 successful months of trading, Riverside is giving customers the chance to win a £150 Cherry Lane shopping voucher to spruce up their garden this Summer. To enter, customers simply need to scan their Cherry-Picked Rewards loyalty card or app each time they make a purchase from now until the start of July. More scans will mean more entries into the competition. Customers can sign up for a free Cherry Lane reward card in-store or by simply downloading the Cherry Lane Rewards app, plus they’ll also receive 10% off their next shop and other special deals including treats on their birthday.

The garden centre manager Dan Prince has been working at Riverside for over seven years, previously as horticulture manager. Dan said: “We’re very pleased with all the fantastic improvements made in time for our first birthday. As part of the Cherry Lane family, we now have so much more to offer including a vast new department full of top-quality plants and exclusive outdoor living ranges, while keeping all the much-loved favourites across the garden centre and café too. We can’t wait to welcome customers as they pop in to enter our voucher competition and celebrate with us.”

Harry Ketchell, operations manager at Cherry Lane Garden Centres, said: “As an independent family-run business, we were keen to continue the family ethos of Riverside while also introducing the great value shopping experience that customers expect at Cherry Lane. We are very pleased with the finished result - the team at Riverside has done a brilliant job in managing the transformation. We are very much looking forward to another busy year, with our full summer ranges now in stock. Customers can be sure that Riverside will be bursting with value in 2023 and beyond.”

The UK’s only value garden centre group, Cherry Lane was established in 2001. During the past 22 years, Cherry Lane has gone from strength to strength, starting as a group of three garden centres in East Anglia and growing to 17 across the country today, reaching from Suffolk to Worcester and Essex to Yorkshire. Cherry Lane now also has five of its own on-site nurseries, which cultivate the group’s Grown by Us range of homegrown plants that are sold across the business.

Riverside Garden Centre by Cherry Lane is located at Hayfield Lodge, Lower Road, Hockley SS5 5LE. For more information, visit www.cherry-lane.co.uk