Halls Of Heddon Flower Fields

Under the bluest of skies, curling the corner on Heddon Lane, we experienced a cavalcade of colour and creativity at Halls Of Heddon Flower Fields.

Between August and the first furtive flower fading frosts of winter, these fields are a riot of rainbow coloured chrysanthemums and dahlias, and with varieties such as 'Totally Tangerine' and 'Hadrian's Bubblegum', it's a stunning spectacle in every direction.

It's simply a sight that needs to be seen with your own eyes!

Halls Of Heddon is a regional treasure for green-fingered fellows, and has been for over a hundred years. My dad would buy from no one else. I remember as a child our kitchen windowsills crammed with cuttings, thin white spindly roots reaching out for the light, the smell of Phostrogen and the flaky feel of bone meal between my fingers. In researching this piece and looking at old photos, I realised my dad knew Tom Hall and bought from his Ovington Nursery. If it didn't come from Halls, it wasn't worth having!

As a student with my own first house, I'd peruse the small stall in the Green Market and struggled home on the bus with more than I could carry. I'd inherited my dad's passion for plants.

Though the stall is long gone, the same staff linger on, and Halls must be loyal to its people, as I still see the guys who'd sell me stuff, with punky hairstyles and studs, now still tending their perennials with tamer trims but the same attention to detail.

On a warm and wonderful mid-October day, when everything else is becoming bronze, the dahlia fields at Heddon are awash with every colour imaginable. It's quite a spectacle. With blooms bigger than your hands and some on par with your whole head, they're like a field of fireworks, popping out showy shades right, left and centre.

Founded in 1921 by William Nicholson Hall, Halls of Heddon is the epitome of a family business. Good, proper old-fashioned graft and customer service where they're all involved, kids, cousins, brothers, sisters. They all play a role and maybe that's the secret of their success. They've clearly got this job rooted and booted.

A member of the Northumberland Fusiliers, founder William Hall was a prisoner of war during WWI and contracted a lung condition known as Nephritis.

Upon his repatriation to England, he was discharged from the army and partially pensioned off at ten shillings a week. His doctor advised him to seek employment of an outdoor nature. Having started work at the age of twelve as a garden boy and working at William Younger Breweries as a jobbing gardener and gardener to the manager, Hall knew he could put these skills to work. He applied for a smallholding through Durham County Council, who declined him on “insufficient experience!” This was later to undoubtedly become Northumberland's gain.

With an ever increasing young family, William sought out a derelict old walled garden attached to Heddon House and moved their goods and chattels and bairns the 17 miles from his home in Chester-le-Street to a two bedroomed cottage, to start a new life in Hadrian's Wall Country, a bold and brave move for a mam and dad and four kids!

Who would have known that by fast forwarding 100 years, the foundations he laid would have been so successful?

In the 1930s, a new site at Ovington was purchased to grow the business and a small scale mail order business was established where specialist pansies and violas were sold alongside an emerging passion for Dahlias, of which they sold 115 varieties and 169 different types of Chrysanthemums!

As a result, Chrysanthemum and Dahlia became the focus at Heddon. Over the decades, the Halls have won more medals, awards and accolades than you can shake a stick at a hungry blackbird!

They are simply astounding.

As we walked amongst the strong and vibrant blooms, all you could hear was the impressed and astounded chatter from people walking past the displays, and the gentle thrum of bumble bees collecting nectar from blooms with such fanciful names as October Sky, Strawberry Cream and Snowbound. The only gap in the market was 'The Fabulous North'...maybe next year eh?

When the rest of our gardens are retiring for winter, it seems that Halls are poking their heads above the parapet, bucking that autumnal trend and rippling colour and contentment through our borders.

But it's a process that begins long before the autumn, and Maxine Hall, William's Granddaughter, who manages the Ovington Nursery, told me:

It's no happy accident that these fields are such a kaleidoscope of colour. It's down to sheer hard work and a bit of Hall's mastery in knowing how to produce the best stock possible.

In Autumn 2021 when the country was tentatively trying to return to some sense of normality after Covid, the Halls grasped the nettle and were setting out their stall of centenary celebration at The Harrogate Flower Show.

The Halls had wanted to find a way to mark this special centenary year and worked with willow artist Ruth Thompson to create these wonderful willow figurines of their grandparents, William and Barbara.

Willow Granda and Grandma were loaded with care and chrysanthemums into a van and stole the show at Newby Hall, reflecting the birth of the business from those early days in 1921.

Image courtesy of The Hexham Courant

On reflecting upon the long and lovely history of Halls, David said:

Now, Maxine and David's Grandparents, William and Barbara, are a permanent part of the Halls of Heddon Flower Fields each year when the dahlia and chrysanthemum flowers are in full bloom.

They are genuinely the guardians of the garden.

If autumnal mega blooms and butterflies float your boat, you'd be hard pushed to find such a beautiful array of colour elsewhere.

Go now, while there's no nip in the air and you'll still catch the vibrant and vivacious shapes and shades of the dahlia and chrysanthemum.

They'll knock your socks off!

Thanks to Maxine, David and Ruth for sharing their knowledge and interesting stories with me.