The Ideal Gardening Shopfront in Stapleford Abbotts where the van den Broek family started selling in England c. 1956
The van den Broek nursery in Surrey in 1976
About us
English Hedging is a family run plant nursery specialising in the supply of English grown, instant impact evergreen hedging plants. We can take care of supply, delivery, planting and aftercare. This company was established by Timothy and Thomas van den Broek; two brothers passionate about carrying on the multi generational family history in horticulture. From before the 1900s the van den Broek family were nursery stock growers in Boskoop, Holland. The 1930s brought Adrianus van den Broek over to the UK where he established a successful national mail order business (Ideal Gardening Ltd) in England based out of properties in Essex, Lincolnshire, London and Surrey. In the 1980’s, Timothy and Thomas’ Father, Ron set up his own nursery on some of the family land in Surrey and began specialising in evergreen hedging plants. The brothers grew up on this nursery and began to learn there to love plants along with appreciating the benefit that plants have in enhancing urban life. We like to think our passion for plants runs in the blood!
Planting evergreen hedging on Ron van den Broek’s nursery in the 1980’s
The first ground planting at Oak Farm, Corse Lawn
In 2006 Timothy van den Broek, Ron’s eldest son, established Transplant Nursey Ltd (trading as English Hedging since 2011) to bring the family business into the next generation. Thomas joined the business in 2009 and we started worked towards setting up a new site. English Hedging found a new home in 2022 when we were able to purchase Oak Farm, in Corse Lawn, Worcestershire, a place which has been actively farmed since 1807! Our thankfulness for the legacy left to us by the generations who have gone before gives us energy to build well and to grow both plants, and a business, which is a blessing to future generations.
Thomas now manages the day to day running of the business.
Both Timothy and Thomas are Christians and so are committed to running English Hedging in a way which is just to our employees, fair to our customers and honouring to God. We describe our stock honestly. We deliver when we say we will. We aim to value the customer more than the sale. When we are working on site we will be diligent and always leave the site clean and tidy. We understand that the most important thing for many of our clients is that their suppliers have character that sets them apart. We seek to have that character.
