In This Issue
Smart, Kaemingk and Allensmore are Choice Marketing Suppliers of the Year
Fuel crisis hits garden centre sales
Notcutts resume redevelopment programme after 2020/21 pause
Squire's Twickenham seeks Plant Area Manager
Are you an amazing garden project manager looking for a new challenge? Greenfingers wants to hear from you!
It’s a sell out for the 40th annual GIMA Awards
Key industry achievements during an unpredictable year
Weber opens new European centre in Poland
Plant sales hit by fuel shortages
GARDENA unveils new showroom in Milton Keynes
Runner wearing Leon Boots wellies breaks world record
New product launch just in time for Christmas
Keukenhof optimistic about the 2022 season
Premium Christmas Trees: the sustainable choice
Garden Project Manager – Greenfingers Charity
Plant Area Manager – Full Time – Alternate Weekends – Twickenham
Get your copy of GTN Xtra
Roger Smalley, Smalley House & Garden Plants, has died
Panic buying of pot feet
Slow start for Christmas in September
Autumn growing up by 28%
HTA’s grower committee calls for action on labour shortages and post-Brexit trade controls
Onion sets save the day
BBC’s Tom Heap attends climate-change event
Wild bird care suffers from drop in footfall
RHS celebrates 2021’s community gardening superstars
The best of last week's
Martin Stewart leads industry tributes at Memorial Service for Eddie Topping
Peter Seabrook is NOT panic buying at Meadow Croft Garden Centre...
MD Brett Avery to leave Farplants for new sector
Perrywood's Hannah Powell publishes new book
Glee success for Woodlodge as garden industry reunites
Bestsellers Top 50 charts every week
Buy your subscription to the GTN Bestsellers printed weekly newsletter
All the latest news from the world of pet products
Excitement builds as AQUA 2021 gets set to open
Paleo Ridge appoints new Trade Account Manager
Skinner's launches Get Out & Go!
Good Boy continues growth with first TV campaign
Situations Vacant
Garden Project Manager – Greenfingers Charity
Salary: Negotiable
 
Read more»
Plant Area Manager – Full Time – Alternate Weekends – Twickenham
Salary: £40+ Depending On Experience
 
Read more»
Send us your news and great ideas

Contact us with your news.

Email trevor@pottingshedpress.co.uk or call the GTN News team on 07973 504214

 

 

 

 

 

 


Martin Stewart leads industry tributes at Memorial Service for Eddie Topping

The warmth of Martin Stewart’s tribute to Eddie Topping at the service celebrating the founder of the Barton Grange Group’s life was a moving testimony to the deep affection in which Eddie was held throughout the garden industry.

 

Martin told how his own father had been the first to pick up on the concept of garden centres, but Eddie had “all the skills, energy and ambition required to do it better”.

 

His father, an RAF pilot in World War II, had been reluctant to return to the Stewart family’s “dark, dingey and basically bankrupt” nursery business after the war but wrote home before returning from a trip delivering a plane to the United States in 1955: “I have seen the future – they are called Garden Centres.” The subsequently converted Stewart potting sheds became what was almost certainly the UK’s first embryonic garden centre.

 

It was in that same year that Eddie Topping took over the Rochdale Market fruit and veg stall from his father who (with his wife Ada) was by then busy building up business at the newly-developed hotel at Barton near Preston, adding a modest landscaping business two years later.  Over the decades ahead, Eddie (helped by his three sons, Guy, Peter and Ian) moulded the flourishing Barton Grange Group we know today, with the flagship multi-award winning Brock garden centre at its core, augmented more recently by the enterprising Flower Bowl leisure and entertainment centre. By any measure, it became one of the UK’s most spectacular garden retail, landscaping and leisure businesses.

 

When Martin Stewart’s father, Edward, was elected president of the Horticultural Trades Association in 1960, he would have met Eddie, 12 years his junior. Twenty-two years later, in the year of Edward Stewart’s death, Eddie was also to become HTA president. “He was a huge support to me at that time,” Martin recalled in his tribute. “For those of you not familiar with our trade, it is the most extraordinarily open, warm and friendly industry imaginable. It is now and it was then.”

 

“What a proper pioneering spirit. The finest example of his legacy can be seen within his offspring and the enterprises that they are involved with now. The Barton Grange business with its unique culture has Eddie written right through it like a stick of rock. What an extraordinary legacy.”

 

Martin summed up Eddie Topping as “amazing – a proper entrepreneurial pioneer, someone loved and respected more than anyone I have met in our trade. He earnt his reputation in the most beautiful, calm unruffled manner….”

 

Perhaps the last word should go to one of Eddie’s grandsons, Andrew, who said at the service: “I won the lottery having Eddie as our grandad.”

 

Read a fuller version of Martin Stewarts tribute to Eddie Topping in the upcoming October issue of GTN.

 

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Del.icio.us Digg | Comment (0)
Comment
Name:*

Email Address:*

Comment:*