Cool and unusual

As a young girl, Lisa Wesley was obsessed with plants. “I’d spend hours with my dad looking for wildflowers in the local woods and, when I was about seven, I got hold of some books and began teaching myself all their names.” Then her aunt gave her a little cactus, and soon Lisa had a collection of pocket-money purchases that filled the windowsills of her family home.

Some four decades on, it is no surprise to find that Lisa is running one of the most interesting nurseries in the country. Growild offers a fascinating selection of rare and unusual perennial species, many of them from Japan, China and the Himalayas. She has a large selection of hardy impatiens, begonias, Cirsium, Taraxacum and Saxifraga stolonifera, and grows so many ornamental members of the nettle family that she is currently applying to be recognised as a National Collection holder of hardy Asian Urticaceae, examples of which include Pilea and Elatostema.

Everything is grown from her own seed, cuttings and divisions (or, very occasionally, seed from trusted people who own plants she doesn’t yet have in her collection) to strictly vegan standards, on the former farm in Ayrshire where she has lived with her partner Andrew Blackwood since 2014.

It seems like an obvious and inevitable outcome for a self-confessed ‘plant nerd’, but Lisa’s journey to this point in her life has been far from straightforward. As a neurodiverse individual, Lisa found it impossible to engage with mainstream academic education and instead spent her childhood and teenage years obsessively drawing and painting.

She went on to become a professional artist, working in performance and installation as well as paper-based practices, but gradually found that the pressure to promote herself and her work became unbearable.

“By this point I was living in Glasgow with Andrew, and the Glasgow Botanic Gardens