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Monday, May 4, 2015

Wych Cross Nurseries, Garden Centre, Tea Room and Red Bus

A great stop for tea driving south of London towards Eastbourne.  Immediately left of the traffic light. Park and walk through the huge shop. Warning, if you're after the tea room and toilets and looking at or buying roses, it's a walk outside and downhill through the wonderful outdoor displays.

When you see the big red (London) bus parked, the tea room is just beyond and the toilets are to your right before the tea room.

Time for a picture stop to take the red bus. Toilets, small, just the one for ladies - luckily I'm the only one so no queue.


I see roses, Bush roses. Any standard roses? Another customer points. The rose bush area is huge with the scented standard roses selling out fast at the far end lower down.

I found four fragrant roses, red, white, yellow or pink, hard to find in garden centres around London. I've been looking for weeks.

I find an assistant. The price was £41. Hm. I think.

It's rather large to go in the boot of a car. The assistant suggests putting it in the front passenger seat. But that's where I sit and I'm on a trip from London, not local. Do they deliver. No.

"Do you need a stake?" asks the assistant. That's another £2.50?

I think: "I must have had a stake on the old rose which died."

"You need to dig a square hole and remove the soil which was around the roots of your dead rose. Fill it with ..." Ah - another cost - but we have some stuff we bought for planting a vine.

I asked hopefully, "Any chance of getting one in an end of season sale?"

"Highly unlikely.  No chance of getting any of these in an end of season sale as they are selling out fast," the assistant told me.

Decisions, decisions. I need sustenance. It's time for tea.

The tea room serves a good, filling fruit cake and an espresso coffee with cream on top and milk on the side in a little jug. I like to finish with milk because I believe it whitens my teeth as well as possibly counteracting osteoporosis, and sustaining you more than coffee.
Large Espresso was £2.00. Cake was £3.

We share a table with a friendly lady who seeing me drinking the milk kindly offers to share her leftover tea with me. I decline but thank her and wave goodbye. Gallop uphill to the car.

Two days later, back home I find the Wych Cross Nurseries and Garden Centre website. You can order bush roses. But not the large standard roses which I presume are heavy to send and therefore bulky, breakable and expensive.

Wych Cross Garden Centre
Forest Row
East Sussex
RH18 5JW
Email: roses@wychcross.co.uk
tel:01342 822705.
www.Wychcross.co.uk

Angela Lansbury B A Hons Author, photographer, speaker, English tutor.



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