About Us

Who We Are

Habitat Aid is an award winning, impact driven, Somerset based business founded in 2008. We promote and sell British native trees, hedging, aquatic plants, wildflower seed and heritage fruit trees, which we source from a community of specialist UK nurseries and growers. We also support small UK conservation NGOs through our giving programme. Oh, and we're a B Corporation.

You can find out more about our corporate governance here.

Our Philosophy

We think the local origin and distinctiveness of plants isn’t just important for biodiversity and sustainability, but also culturally.

Over the last century in the UK we have destroyed swathes of our most important and attractive habitats, including almost all of our wildflower meadows. Orchards, ponds, wetlands, hedges, woodland - these should be beautiful elements of our landscape, teeming with life. This is a terrible - and continuing - loss for all of us.

It's difficult for many of us to know what to do to reverse this decline. It can seem overwhelming, particularly when combined with climate change, but we strongly believe that individual actions - however small - are a critically important part of the solution.

Trying To Help

People just aren't aware of the collapse in biodiversity associated with the continuing loss of these habitats. Over the years media coverage has improved, but compared to climate change - a related isue, of course - it has been a small story until recently. Part of what we do is to get this message out.

It can be difficult to understand where plants and seeds come from. Pricing pressure and lack of consumer understanding has driven many UK growers to the wall over the last 30 years, in a situation in many ways analogous to the food industry.

Sometimes plants for sale are grown using pesticides which then harm the insects feeding from them. The wildflower seed business is opaque and unregulated; quality and provenance vary enormously. “Native” trees and hedging are routinely sourced from Europe, as are British fruit tree varieties. Native pond plants are often contaminated by invasive non-native weeds.

We sell people the right plants and seeds, from the right suppliers. We're now a significant customer for some of these typically small, family run businesses, some of whom we've been dealing with for over a decade.

We have close links to a number of specialist science based UK conservation charities too, who we also help promote. Their work is as important as it is underfunded, and we try to amplify their messages about good practice whenever we can. We donate around 2% of our sales to these kind of NGOs, amounting to approaching £125k from 2015.

Our Work

Some of our higher profile projects have included landscaping over 70 solar farms. The two largest of these were each over 200 acres. We've supplied the plants for projects like Earth Watch's Tiny Forests, and other NGO clients include various Wildlife Trusts and Friends of the Earth. We supply lots of corporate clients, including names as diverse as Charlie Bigham, the Co-op, Good Energy, Hillier’s Nurseries, M&S, ME+EM and Ffern. We also supply and advise a number of government organisations and garden designers.

 

Other Things We're Up To

We also operate two other websites:

British Wildflower Seeds which offers smaller packet sizes of wildflower meadow seed mixes.

British Pond Plants which does what is says on the tin.

Carbon, Chemicals & Peat

Please see our Environmental Statement for a full description.

Pricing

Many of our suppliers ship directly to our clients, which saves on cost and emissions. This is why we have a £100 minimum order size - otherwise we might end up paying multiple delivery charges on relatively small orders and losing bucket loads of money! Since COVID we've had to take on delivery of pond and most hedge plants ourselves to ensure safe delivery. All the prices on the website are quoted including VAT and P&P.

Licensing

We are authorised by DEFRA to market seeds (licence number 7615) and to issue plants passports (registration number GB140924). We are also Plant Healthy certified.

 

Feedback

Please let us have feedback on our products and suppliers using the contact form and let us know which other products or charities you would like to see on the site.

News

Do use the box to subscribe to our occasional email newsletters, and follow us (and Woody the Sealyham) on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.