Garden Centre Catering Awards winner profile

What an amazing location for the garden centre and your teashop. What is the story behind this place?
It's primarily an ornamental garden, so a lot of people come to visit that, though a lot of people come just for us, too. We're quite unusual in that you don't have to pay to get into the gardens in order to get into the teashop. This means that we're used by a lot of locals, as well as by tourists.

Waterperry Gardens was founded by [pioneering horticulturalist] Beatrix Havergal. It was one of the first places that women could come to to learn to be gardeners, so it’s quite famous.

And then, since the mid-70s, we've been owned by the School of Philosophy and Economic Science. They own the house and everything else here, basically.

It’s a great place to have a teashop specifically. How do you try and fit yourself into this location?
We make everything ourselves here, apart from the bread, all the cakes, all the jam, all the main courses. We try to be as local as we possibly can as well. For instance, our ice cream was from Purbeck, we love Purbeck, but we’ve got Chiltern ice cream now, and they use the same dairy as we do.

What do you have in your typical afternoon tea?
The celebration one is quite traditional, but we call it Waterperry tea, because it's got our scones and our mini quiches it in as well. Those are the two things that we're very famous for. People always tell us that we do the best scones.

Are they made fresh on site as well?
Absolutely, and often twice a day, as we run out. We sell ridiculous amounts of scones – 26,460 last year. We get through a lot of scones and a lot of quiche in the summer, and we make all the pastry as well. It's very fresh food; not anything too fancy, but it’s really good quality food.

The afternoon tea offer must work perfectly here, as it’s clearly a place where people want to take their time…
Yes, we get the tourist buses arriving in summer. They spend the day here and have a look around the garden centre. There's a museum and a couple of shops here as well, so you can spend the whole day here. Then in the summer we put on events, craft fairs and then the Waterperry Opera Festival. There's a lot going on here, so we’re very, very busy.

What would you say your typical clientele is?
It splits between during the week and at the weekend. We get the younger clientele at the weekend, and then the older generation during the week.

This means that in the week we can use slightly less traditional ingredients, like kale and chard, which we grow here. We've got our own wall garden, so we use some of the produce from that.

What are your best sellers?
Definitely the scones. We generally sell out of most of our food, so it's a struggle to make sure we've got enough for the day at this time of year. From May until September, we know we are going to be flat out every day.

Is it important to enter awards like ours? I’m assuming Waterperry Garden has won a fair few in its time…
No, I've never bothered entering any other before. I've been so busy being the manager here!

Really? What prompted you enter now?
I'm really proud of our afternoon tea, so I thought, ‘Do you know what? We really deserve that award’. So I applied for it, and I stand by that.

Business has increased since we won the award, which was a bit scary initially, because you think people are going to start saying, ‘Oh, that's not worth it’. But they haven't said that at all; we get a lot of positive comments, saying it's the best one they’ve ever had.

Has this whet your appetite? Could you be ready to enter a second award?
Yes, I think we will enter the Independent Garden Centre Award one this time, because we make our own food and we source things locally.

What one tip would you offer on running business like this well?
Obviously customer service is really important. I'm very lucky, as I've got a really good team here. They’re very friendly and they actually talk to the customers. Sometimes we have a queue out of the door and people are a bit disgruntled, but if you engage with them, that really helps.

But the really important thing is to make sure your food is up to standard. We're not too fancy here, but what we make is of really good quality.

Finally, what's next? What are you your plans for the future?
All I can say at the moment is that the people who own us are investing heavily in our future. There will be more news to come soon…

Go to gardencentrecateringawards.co.uk if you would like to follow in Waterperry Gardens’ footsteps and win big at the Garden Centre Catering Awards!

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