Wyevale Garden Centres has moved away from being a plant- and horticultural-based business to more like a leisure company, Guy Hands has told the Evening Standard.

Hands, whose Terra Firma company owns WGC, formerly The Garden Centre Group said in an interview with the newspaper:

“We tend to go for businesses where there’s a strong transformational element to them.

"Something like The Garden Centre Group is a good example of that where we’ve moved it from being plant- and horticultural-based to making it more like a leisure company.

“We’re two years into it, earnings have doubled and the management team believe they can double earnings again over the next three or four years, so the business is doing very well.”