The internet is full of jokes about St Jude, once again photos of wheely bins and plastic patio chairs lying on their sides with the side splitting captions “Utter Devastation” “We can Rebuild”, all terribly humorous.

We were really lucky across Herefordshire and Worcestershire, St Jude tracked further south than anticipated and whereas we got a good soaking with localised flooding we didn’t suffer anything like the predicted damaging high winds.

As a business we use social media, and for us twitter is a major part off keeping up to date with suppliers, trends and just keeping in touch with the rather fab peeps that fill our timeline with snippets of whats going on in their lives. So we have seen and heard from people truly devastated by St Jude and those, who today are starting to rebuild.

Blackmoor Nurseries have lost over 3 hectares of orchards in fruit. The ferocity of St Jude snapped concrete supports and trunks alike leaving a trail of devastation.





If you can’t imagine what 3 hectares look like its the equivalent of two Lords Cricket Grounds, Three International Rugby Pitches or, for our American and Canadian readers, Three Baseball Fields.

For a gardener to loose one tree can be really distressing, but we are talking about hundreds upon hundreds of trees. So not only is most of this years crop of apples from these fields lost, but so is the crop for the next three or four years. Multiply this by the number of other nurseries and farms affected and the true cost of this storm does indeed become devastating.

Happily for Blackmoor and for us, their retail section hasn’t suffered in the same way, so they are still very much open for business as usual.

As too are Victoriana Nurseries who awoke to find St Jude had, quite literally, blown thorough their nursery, punching out the glasshouse panes along the way.

Now I’m sure somebody in Parliament will come up with the idea of a means tested, give us your inside leg measurement and your first born child – Storm Compensation Package, wrapped up in miles and miles of red tape and finished off with a pretty red bow. But as the Great British Buying Public we can all do our bit, by supporting our local and independent nurseries.

So go online, search them out and show them that they may be down but they’re not out. After all St Jude may be the patron saint of lost causes but he’s not needed here!