Greenplantswap.co.uk – Plant Swapping.

Plant swapping has always been part of gardening, swapping plants from your garden with friends,neighbours and family. In a lots of ways plant swapping is what gardening is all about learning about plants and the environment in general and exchanging knowledge with your fellow gardeners.  The practice of plant swapping goes way back to the start of gardening and records show that great gardeners and renowned scientists such as Joseph Hooker and Charles Darwin often swapped plants they had discovered to increase their own collections. In the Victoria times plant swapping was at it height with many Victorians being keen collectors of plants such as ferns and African violets that were easy to propagate and swap with friends.

One of the best examples of the results of plant swapping is the traditional English cottage garden, almost impossible to design because of the random nature of the planting, the best cottage gardens are often created by the creator of the garden swapping plants, cuttings and seeds with neighbours plus friends that live in the same area. The benefit being that they have access to plant that have a good chance of thriving in your local condition because the plants gained  through swapping have come from a very local source normally grown on the same type of soil.

The random nature of cottage gardens often comes from the nature of swapping plants, if you swap a plant with a friend you are have to find some space in your garden for the plant to grow so that on your friends next visit you can show you skill as a gardener. This random and unplanned supply of plants leads to the typical cottage garden look of the quintessential English cottage garden with a good number of classical cottage garden plants lend themselves to being swapped in this way such as pinks,crocosmia, hollyhocks and delphiniums.

As people have less free time now than in the Victorian period and become less connected with friends and neighbors locally over the last 20 years plant swapping took a downturn but now with the Internet and greater access to information and messaging with such services as twitter and facebook plant swapping is on the up turn showing a resurgence in it popularity. There are now a number of web sites now focusing on making plant swapping more of a national practice rather than just a local activity making it possible to swap and trade plant all over the UK. One such site we recently looked at is www.greenplantswap.co.uk  – recently launched it enables you by membership to swap, trade and buy plants from gardeners both large and small – the larger one often being nurseries. Its easy to use and although only recently launched already contains a wide selection of plants.  Our conclusion is greenplantswap.co.uk is well worth a look especially if you are starting a garden from scratch without much knowledge membership to www.greenplantswap.co.uk will gain you access to a whole range of plants that come with a lot of knowledge from the people you are swapping with – the people that have grown them and thats what you do not get when obtaining plants from a DIY super store or most garden centres.