Order & Delivery FAQs

First, check your order status in your account. This won't give you a date, only confirm that your order is being processed.
For further information, please Contact Us.

Once you have placed an order and can see it in your account, please Contact Us to amend it.
Orders may be amended up to the point where they are ready for packing and dispatch.

To cancel your order for any reason, simply go to it in your account and click the big red Cancel Order button.
No money has been taken from your card, so there is no need for a refund.
We will email you confirmation of the cancellation.
To tell us why you are cancelling, send us feedback in a message and we will get back to you if there is something we can do.

If something is missing when you unpack your order:

1. Check the delivery documents: If an item was not in stock and therefore left off the order, this will be noted on the documents attached to your parcel. Your card will not have been charged for these items.
2. Recheck your order: Untangle all bundles of plants, and inspect the inner packaging for stray plants, or packets taped to the packaging.

If you are definitely missing an item, or have been charged for an item not on the delivery documents, please Contact Us.

• Order Processing Time: Usually 2 weeks, up to 3 weeks in busy Winter periods.
• Delivery is by next working day courier, or 2 days for remote areas (note: not the next day after you place the order!)
• Delivering different living plants is always subject to seasonal availability, adverse weather events, and other occasional unavoidable delays.
• If your order contains plants with different delivery seasons, our team will email you with details about splitting it.
• Remember that we don't charge your card until before delivery.

Your basket gives you a delivery estimate until you enter your delivery address during checkout, when it tells you the final delivery price.

Typical delivery costs, may vary:

• Seedlings in Jumbo Plugs: £5
• Bareroot hedge plants: Under £10.
• Pot grown small plants & shrubs: £8-15.
• Bareroot & Pot grown trees: £25.
• Pallet, heavy rootballed plants, or dedicated van to remote place: up to £96.

We don't give free delivery (outside of special offers), but you can collect from us in Castle Cary if you're local.

About split orders: 

• We must split orders that contain plants with different planting seasons, because it's impossible to send them together. 
• We will handle this and notify you.
• There will be a supplementary delivery charge.

• Anywhere on mainland Great Britain and the Isle of Wight.
• Delivery surcharges may apply to the Isle of Wight, and some parts of Scotland (calculated during checkout).
• We do not deliver to any other offshore destinations including Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Skye, Channel Islands, or Scottish Isles.

Sometimes, it depends on the location.
Any surcharge is calculated when you enter the delivery address during checkout.

All delivery months are inclusive, and subject to weather conditions.
Bareroot delivery is at the mercy of the frost and rain: plants cannot be lifted by us, or planted by you, during frost or heavy rain. 

• All bareroot plants are only delivered November to March (weather permitting!)
• Most pot grown plants are delivered year round
• Lavender is delivered late April / June - September (wet, cold Spring weather often delays the start of the season)
  
• Dry bulbs (except Dahlias) are delivered September to November
• Bulbs in the green are delivered February to  April
• Dahlia tubers are delivered March to April
  
• Cosmos & Sweet Pea seedlings in jumbo plugs are delivered March to July

No, the only location we deliver to outside the mainland is the Isle of Wight.

Please Contact Us or email us at support@ashridgetrees.co.uk with:

1. Some photographs of the damaged plants
2. Your order number
3. The date of receipt of your delivery
4. Any other relevant details

We will get right back to you.

The minimum order is £15, excluding delivery.

• No signature is required.
• Our courier will leave your parcel in a safe place, which you can indicate when placing your order. 

My card got rejected at checkout, but it works fine everywhere else!

When you check out, the Stripe payment system creates a secure, encrypted token with your bank, just like on Amazon, meaning that we never store your actual card details.

You pay nothing at the time you place the order, and we use the secure token to charge your card just before dispatch.

Your bank's automatic fraud detection system may ask to confirm that you're the person buying this token, and you agree to being charged later.
In some cases, your bank needs you to update your digital security details in order to prevent this type of problem in future.

If you get a payment error message that says "please use a different card" and you know the card is working, please contact your bank.

The issue is not with your card, or our website.

Some banks send a stern sounding warning along the lines of "checkouts that charge you nothing at the time of ordering might be fraudulent".

This is a generic statement for the bank's benefit. It is not based on Ashridge's spotless trading history since 1999, nor the industry-leading Stripe payment system that we use, which serves some of the world's biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, Shopify, and AirBnB.

All Other Payment Issues

Please Contact Us with your name, email address and billing postcode.
We will find your unpaid order and send you a new payment link by email from support@ashridgetrees.co.uk, which will take you to a secure payment page.

• We are only able to give direct advice about the plants that we sell to people who buy them from us.
• We share a good load of horticultural experience in our advice pages and newsletter.
• If you are new to gardening, you simply must start with the Royal Horticultural Society's advice.

The best book for diving into ornamental gardening is The Well Tempered Garden by Christopher Lloyd, first published in 1970. 
We recommend a newer edition for practical use, the original is for shilling nostalgia.

• We only sell what is listed on our website.
• Some plants are only delivered in certain months of the year, and although we usually open pre-orders in advance, some will be listed as Out of Stock for a few months each year.
• When a plant is Out of Stock, you can use the Email Me button to get a reminder as soon as it's back in stock.

Type or paste your discount code into the box provided in your basket or the first pages of checkout.

• Mostly yes, apart from Tulip bulbs and Dahlia tubers, which are Dutch.
• Many plants are grown on our nursery and nearby land in Somerset, and we contract long term with specialist growers around the UK for the vast majority of the rest.
• We want to use UK grown plants wherever possible, but when demand gets high we source some stock from Holland and France, in compliance with UK and EU laws and best practices.
• When we source native plants from abroad, we only use nurseries that grow British seed.

Read our plant delivery size guide for details.

Everything will be fine if planting is delayed!
Bareroot and pot-grown plants can be stored for a long time if necessary.

If bareroot planting is delayed in winter:
If your bareroot plants arrive and planting will be delayed for less than a week, open the top of the packaging leaving the roots in their bag and store them in a cold place out of the sun, ideally outside.
It doesn't matter at all if the weather is freezing, but you must not move the plants around when they are frozen.
If a week passes and it's clear that planting is delayed even further, consider "heeling them in" by digging a little trench, lying the plants on their sides with their roots in the trench and covering them with soil.
Heeling in is not essential, the plants will be fine in their bags, but it may give peace of mind.
Bareroot plants must be planted properly by March in the South.
Gardeners in the North can usually get away with planting well into April.

If pot-grown planting is delayed:
Simply put your plants in a sunny place and water them when the top inch of soil is dry.
This might be every day or two in a scorching hot mid-summer, but during a wet winter it usually isn't necessary.

Freezing weather & snow must delay planting

Frozen roots are brittle and easily damaged when moved!
Don't attempt any planting when your soil is frozen, or when the air is below zero.

1. Most of a plant's energy is stored in the roots during winter.
2. Broken roots lead to poor Spring growth, and the plant will die if the damage is bad.
3. The roots don't have to snap off: they die below the point where they were bent while frozen.

Store your plants in a cold place out of direct sunlight, ideally outside.
Open the parcel so the tops of the plants are in the open air.
The roots are in a black polythene bag, where they should stay during the freeze continues.
You should not store your plants indoors, but cold outbuilding is fine.
You must not move your plants at all during freezing weather after you have stored them.

When can I get planting?

"When the soil is soft enough to work, the plants will be too"
When you can dig the ground comfortably, unpack the plants on a day when the temperature is above freezing, wet their roots really well and plant them as normal.

If the soil freezes immediately after planting, your plants will be fine.
Leave them alone until the ground has completely thawed out.
When it is soft again, firm the soil back around your plants by walking, not stamping, around them where the soil may have lifted.