Great businesses have the ability to stick in our memories for life and for many West Cumbrians, Boonwood does just that.
Based just outside of Gosforth, Boonwood Garden Centre is a family run business that first set up shop in 1986.
Owned by husband and wife duo Gary, 55, and Kay Mossop, 55, who live on the site, it’s a business that has worked its way into the hearts of local people – particularly through its hugely popular Christmas displays that take months to create.
But when it first opened its doors, Boonwood was run by horticulturist Gary and his Dad Stanley Mossop, who bought the land for hybridising Achimenes, or Victorian hot water plants.
Kay said: “People started calling in because they’d seen a greenhouse go up and they were asking if they had vegetable plants and this and that.
“So it just snowballed from there, and because Gary and his dad are both interested in growers, they just started growing what people were asking for and it went from there.”
Kay met Gary one year after Boonwood opened its doors – and it’s a relationship that had a romantic comedy style start.
She said: “I didn’t come onto the scene until I met Gary in 1987 and I started helping out at weekends or when I was off work because I worked full time then as a weights and measures inspector for trading standards, which is how I met him actually, I prosecuted him!
“It’s a long story, but we didn’t go to court, I issued him with an order because he was selling home grown potatoes on kitchen scales and not on proper scales.”
After slowly building the business up as a three – Gary and Kay bought Boonwood from Gary’s dad and fully took over the business in 1995.
Kay said: “I didn’t have much involvement until then. I left work when I had my first child and we took it over and started to run it ourselves, so at that point I was able to have more input on what I wanted to do, which was Christmas.
“So now Gary does the growing side and garden centre side and I am pure Christmas.”
Despite having a small team and space to work with – Boonwood has one of the biggest Christmas displays in Cumbria.
Kay added: “It’s just got bigger and bigger every year. With the Christmas display, I come up with different ideas and themes every year and I source my stock to fit my themes rather than buying stock in and then doing the theme.
“Over the years we’ve done themes like the Polar Express, we’ve done theatre which proved popular and was Mary Poppins, rooftops of London all that, Dickensian, street markets, Victorian school rooms…I’ve done ion everything.
“One that was popular was Christmas through the eras and we had when Jesus was born to Victorian, Art Deco and Retro to modern, so I’ve kind of done it all.
“It can be one simple thing I suddenly think of or see and I do mood boards for colours and themes to tie it all in together. We do it across two structures so I like the two to flow into each other to give people a story of Christmas.”
Kay’s Christmas displays require 12 weeks of work to get right as the staging has to be built from the ground up inside greenhouses.
Over the years her displays have included a ceiling full of back-lit cotton wool to mimic the Northern Lights, fully built out mock log cabins and fully immersive product displays that incorporate props.
She said: “It takes around 12 to 14 weeks to build the displays up and we have it officially open in the second weekend of October and it runs right through to Christmas.
“But I start thinking about what I’m planning for next year around October time of the previous year. It takes up around eight months of the year as we go to buy stock in January as we’ve got to have orders in by March as it’s all prototypes at trade shows, so I’ve got to know what I’m doing really early.
“Once our bedding plant season ends which is around when the kids leave school in mid July, that is when we start stripping out the greenhouses and pressure washing them. Because everything is glass all the staging has to be built from the ground up.
“I adore Christmas, I love the build up to it and hate it after Christmas dinner, it’s a known joke in our house by Christmas dinner that I say right, I’ve had enough, can we put it all away!
“It’s become a big part of my life, I have four trees in my own house and they’re all different colours.”
Work on this year’s Christmas display is already well underway and Kay said the theme she has in store is ‘après-ski’.
She added: “It’ll be in the style of a ski village and will look as if you’re in the alps and a ski lodge with lots of Nordic furs and plaid and red and whites. We’re also going to set up a photo booth ski lift chair.
“It’s going to be great, I just need to get the stock as there’s been issues with pirates and rebels on the Cape of Good Hope and everything is delayed by three to four weeks.
“But I also set aside a budget every year for props, so I’ve had signs made for après-ski, and I’ve ordered things like full keg barrels, eight ft skis, and old Victorian ice skates and I order my backdrops from America as they’re the best.
“Some of the props I keep and reuse and others I sell them as part of the Christmas display. But I’d say a good 80 per cent of the displays are stock.”
Kay’s displays are so detailed and immersive that they’ve become incredibly popular with people from multiple generations.
She said: “When customers come in, because I’ve done it for so long, I’ve got people coming in with their children who were little children when they first came in, so that’s lovely that it’s become a family tradition.
“I used to babysit for two twins who’d sit on the counter in their car seat while their mum had a look around and they’re now grown up and married with their own children, so it is surreal.
“And of course, we have Santa Claus which is a big pull for little ones coming in and it’s all done for charity, so the proceeds go to our local Royal British Legion.
“Our Santa Claus is a Veteran and he’s brilliant with the kids and looks like the real deal. So that’s been really popular and we’ve been doing that for three years.
“But I didn’t realise how big of a following we had until this summer. My daughter’s boyfriend was at one of these career seminars and he was at a meet and greet as he’s going to be working based in Warrington.
“His appraiser was a lady who had worked at Sellafield but is from Warrington, but she knew the area well and asked if he knew the area and he said he did and that his girlfriend’s parents have Boonwood.
“She stopped and said oh my god, fantastic Christmas display, what’s she doing this year? and that was down in Manchester!
“For us, word of mouth is a fantastic way of advertising. I used to have leaflets and we had radio adverts and jingles made, but nothing beats social media and word of mouth for us.”
Boonwood is also popular with locals for its unique selection of Christmas trees that are imported from Norway and carefully looked after by Gary.
Kay said: “We’e famous for our fresh cut Christmas trees here, purely because Gary is a horticulturist so he knows how to look after them and that they have to be sourced responsibly and not from the UK as we don’t grow them very well here.
“But I am also so fussy on shapes, so everything has to pass me and we source the best. Since Covid and the cost of living we do two grades standard and premium.
“I have quite a following of people who pre-order their Christmas tree and they always say I want Kay’s quality and can you get Kay to pick it out for me! The lads have patience galore pulling every single tree out to find the perfect tree.”
Like many other business – Kay said facing Covid and the cost of living crisis has been a challenge, but that Boonwood has managed to keep going strong through the ups and downs.
She said: “It has been stressful with Covid and the cost of living. Our cost of electricity quadrupled last year, it was shocking how much we had to pay.
“But we kept the business going through Covid and there was a thought we were going to go bankrupt when the lockdown was announced. There was no question of it, and when I stopped crying for two days it was right, what are we going to do now?
“So we thought well, we’ll grow it all ourselves. We’ll deliver it free of charge to the local community and we ended up hiring vans and we turned the garden centre into an actual mini Amazon where we would deliver to people in the local area next day or within a few days.
“We’re only a small team, but everyone pulled out all the stops that year, so looking back things have been eventful and every day is different.
“But when we re-opened we were one of the only garden centre’s continuing on because we’d grown it all, as long as we had the seeds and soil we could grow and not buy in, so it proved its worth.
“You do find yourself thinking oh my god, have I done all this right. But there was a little girl sitting on Santa’s knee last year, she couldn’t have been more than 12 or 18 months old, and the absolute look of love on her face was heart melting, it really way.
“I thought no, this is what doing this and Christmas is all about. It’s about making people feel how she did and it was lovely, just absolutely lovely.”
While some businesses have five or 10 year plans – for Boonwood, it’s all about working with the seasons.
Kay added: “We always have business plans, we have to be six months to eight months ahead always as the weather can change what we want to do and out here we’re on septic tanks so flooding can cause problems, but it just depends on what life throws at us.
“We’re not the sort of business that can have a five year plan. We just take it year by year and move from season to season and always work based on what the next season will bring.
“We’re only a small team, but I have fantastic staff that have helped us along the way as this year has been quite busy for me.
“I went away because my parents are unwell and when I came back I showed them my mood board for the display, the idea and I came back and we’ve got canopies, Santa’s log cabin and honestly they’re just fantastic.
“I know I can trust them to do whatever, so it hasn’t just all been me and Gary, big thanks has to go to Sarah, Dominic, Robert and Kevin too.”
