We have had a lovely first day at Gardeners World Live at the NEC. It has been a real pleasure to meet so many friends and make some new ones. We are delighted with a Gold Medal and are looking forward to appearing on BBC 2's Gardeners World tomorrow (Friday 13th June) at 8pm. The photo below shows our display at the show. The show is open Friday, Saturday from 9am-6pm and 9am to 5pm on Sunday - hope to see you there.
Welcome to Isle of Portland Orchids. We grow species orchids in Dorset. We only sell plants that we have raised ourselves from seed or division, at our nursery, and sell online and at shows.
We are Annie and Simon Pugh-Jones and we care passionately about conservation especially in the biodiverse tropical forests of our wonderful planet. Simon set up and ran the Writhlington School Orchid Project for 30 years before retiring in 2023.
We are happy to come to shows to sell our plants and put up a small display. We are also available to give talks about tropical orchids in cultivation and the wild. Please contact us via isleofportlandorchids@gmail.com
Every week we will focus on one of the 500 or so species in our collection and share information on its cultivation, wild habitat and history.
Click here to see this weeks orchid
We also provide information pages for the orchids we grow and sell - find out about our orchids here
We have put together information pages for more than 150 of the 500 orchid species we grow in the nursery.
We sell plants online and at shows. Follow the link here and subscribe to get updates of new plant listings. With each plant we will send links to cultural information about the species offered.
We send our plants in First Class post and so post on Mondays and Wednesdays giving plants the best chance for spending a minimum time in transit. We will delay posting if the weather is very cold.
We will be selling plants at several shows in 2025. Here are the dates confirmed so far for the rest of 2025
Devon Orchid Society Show - Sat May 3rd. Budleigh Salterton Public Hall, Station Road, Budleigh Salterton, Devon EX9 6RJ
UK INTERNATIONAL ORCHID SHOW at BBC GARDENERS WORLD LIVE June 12th – June 15th, 2025, NEC Birmingham
Gloucestershire Rare Plants & Orchids Fair 2025, 10 am to 4.30 pm, Saturday 5 July, St. Mary de Crypt Church, Southgate Street, Gloucester,GL1 1TP
In our orchid culture pages we look in more detail at the habitats our orchids come from and how we replicate those conditions in cultivation.
Read about our observations from our expeditions to the diverse tropical forests of South America, Central America, Africa, The Himalayas and South East Asia, and how we grow the plants native to these habitats.
We have a laboratory to grow orchids from seed. We only use our own seed produced by pollinating palnts in our collection.
We use aseptic technique in clean air to grow our orchids in jars on special growing media.
Our nursery on Portland looks south towards the sea. We have two greenhouses that we call 'The Cloud Forest Glasshouse' and 'The Himalayan Glasshouse'
The Cloudforest Glasshouse is where we grow our species native to the cool mountain forests of Central and South America. We maintain a minimum temperature of 12C and provide shading in the summer. We aim to replicate the conditions we have experienced on visits to the mountain rainforests and cloud forests of Brazil and Costa Rica.
The Himalayan Glasshouse is where we grow the iconic orchids if the tropical monsoon forests of the Himalayas. We maintain a minimum temperature of 7C and aim to replicate the forest habitats we have explored in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh.
We grow warm orchid species in our living room with a minimum of 17C. We use glass cabinets and call this growing area 'The Hot Lowland Cabinets' and aim to replicate the growing conditions we have found in the lowland rainforests we have explored in Borneo, Guatemala, Belize and Assam.
If you would like to hear more about how we grow our orchids, we are available to give lectures and talks to orchid societies and gardening groups. Please contact us via isleofportlandorchids@gmail.com
