Garden Centres Editing and Proofreading Services

Somebody buys a beautiful shrub in April, plants it in the shadiest corner of a heavy clay garden, waters it twice, and by August it is dead. The label said "full sun to partial shade, moist well-drained soil, hardy". Every word was true. None of it told a person with a north-facing clay garden not to buy this plant.

We edit what garden centres and plant retailers produce — plant labels and care information, planting and aftercare guidance, seasonal and problem-solving signage, plant guarantee terms, catalogue and website descriptions, workshop and event material, and the advice sheets given out at the till. Our editors work on instructions that decide whether a living thing survives.

The plant label is where a garden centre either creates a repeat customer or sells them a disappointment, and its failure is a list of ideal conditions with no statement of the fatal ones. Customers do not need to know where a plant thrives; they need to know where it will die. We work through these so the conditions that kill it are stated plainly and first — the wet winter soil, the cold wind, the deep shade, the alkaline ground — since a customer can look at their garden and rule themselves out, and cannot infer the same thing from a list of preferences; so the soil requirement is expressed in terms a person can test in their own garden rather than as a term, because "well-drained" means nothing to somebody with clay and "if a hole you dig still holds water an hour after filling it, this will not survive here" means everything; so hardiness is given as a temperature and a caveat about wet cold, given that most losses are drainage rather than frost; so the eventual size is stated with the time to reach it, as this is the second commonest cause of regret; so the first year's watering is written as a schedule with a way of checking rather than as "water regularly"; so the guarantee is stated with what it does and does not cover; so the label says what to do in the first fortnight, since that is when most plants are lost; and so a genuinely difficult plant is described as difficult. Labels written this way produce gardens that survive and customers who come back.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including supplier information, guarantee terms and business documents. We are editors rather than horticulturists or plant specialists, and we offer no view on plants, growing conditions or cultivation. What we can do is tell a customer where the plant will die.