Let’s drop everything and go to a garden centre; it always ends well. Two of the best? Gemmell’s in Ayrshire and McLaren’s near Glasgow, and even though they’re a bit on the slick side for me, I’m partial to a Dobbies now and then as well. Drop me off there and I’ll have a thoroughly nice time, wandering around with the smell of compost and coffee and cyclamen in the air. Plants? Fastest route to happy really.

Ah but: there’s trouble. You may have noticed that Dobbies is planning to shut 17 of its 77 stores, including shops in Inverness and Edinburgh, in an attempt to stem its losses. The chain is now owned by an investment firm, Ares Management, and a £7m loss has turned into a £105m loss and so 11 of the garden centres and all the high-street shops are getting the chop. The company said this: “The restructuring plan and other strategic initiatives are expected to return Dobbies to sustainable profitability through site rationalisations, rent reductions and other cost savings”.

But let’s try and take a shovel to the business-speak shall we and get underneath it to what’s really going on because, having spoken to people in the industry, it’s clear that garden centres, big and small, are under stress. There’s also an uncomfortable truth about the industry that’s adding to the pressure right now and which the Scottish Government hasn’t come to terms with but is going to have to (soon).

Some of the stress faced by Dobbies is specific to Dobbies and some of it applies across the industry, like heating for example. A lot, not all, of the plants that are left over at the end of the growing season need to be kept heated over the winter and we all know what’s happened to the cost of heating. So the best garden centres are the ones that have done work on producing some of their own energy, using biomass for example. It means they’re possibly the ones that are more likely to survive.

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More specific to Dobbies is the fact they do a lot more than gardening. You can get all the usual plants and compost, but you can also pick up candle holders and cuddly toys and organic lavender fudge. This is all fine – and most of us would expect a café in a garden centre these days I guess – but the problem is that the margin on non-gardening stuff like candle holders is narrow and the really decent profits are made on plants you’ve grown yourself. So there are dangers in diversification and Dobbies has diversified more than most.

But let’s get to the uncomfortable truth now because it’s also adding to the stress on garden centres and, as yet, a solution hasn’t been found. What’s happening is that the Scottish Government is putting pressure on the industry to go peat-free and is consulting on a new law that would ban the sale of peat altogether and in principle, this is all very well: we need to protect peatlands.

The problem – and this will come as no surprise to anyone with a working knowledge of the Scottish Government’s legislative record – is the government hasn’t handled the situation well. Various deadlines for the industry to go peat-free have come and gone without anything really happening. The government also appears not to have done the necessary work to understand how the industry works in Scotland.

Basically, the horticulture industry isn’t set up to go peat-free quickly or on its own. A lot of the plants we buy in Scotland are imported from Europe so it’s very hard, impossible actually, for the Scottish industry to change quickly if the European industry isn’t (which it isn’t). The other issue is that one of the big touted alternatives to peat, coconut coir, is made from a product that’s shipped from the other side of the world so the environmental arguments for making the shift start to look a wee bit dodgy.

(Image: Dobbies)

To be fair, discussions between the government and the industry are ongoing but some of the problems the industry encountered with the Scottish Government during the pandemic are happening again. You may remember that ministers insisted back then that garden centres shut down even though supermarkets and big places like B&Q were allowed to stay open. They also didn’t seem to listen to the logic that places that by nature have big open spaces could be safe and they certainly didn't seem to listen when businesses told them they were suffering.

The same applies now. Everyone understands the environmental priorities that are at work, but the government needs to recognise what the industry has already done – it has significantly reduced its use of peat in recent years. Ministers also need to try and understand the realities on the ground and give the industry the time it needs, and the support it needs, to fully transition. The government wants it all to happen early, today, yesterday, because it'll look good for them, but it also needs to look at the facts and be realistic.

In the meantime, you and I can also do our bit by going out today to a garden centre. For me, I think it might be Gemmell’s, partly because their choice of gardening equipment is good and I need a new spade, and partly because the macaroni cheese in their café is among the most cheesy and the best. I’m sure places like it will survive and thrive (despite Amazon and supermarkets and heating costs and zealous governments). But we are needed too, so let’s drop everything and go to a garden centre. We can do our bit, and take the fastest route to happy.

Mark Smith is a features and opinion writer for The Herald