Gift for gardening

JOHN Hutchinson has a gift for gardening – a few hundred gifts actually in his Vflora Gardens and Gifts Collection.

John, who lives in Bellerby, near Leyburn, has always been a keen gardener, a proper one, the sort that does gardens pretty much from scratch, as with the very traditional cottage garden at his 17th Century house.

So when redundancy gave him the chance to start his own business, the seed was already planted. The result is Vflora – a website and catalogue full of gifts for everyone whether they have green fingers or just like to admire the results of someone else’s work. He started the business last year with neighbour Lyn Matheson.

“We wanted things that were a bit different but which were of the highest quality. Ideally useful, beautiful and unusual. We sell only things we’d really like ourselves.”

That includes their best sellers – life-sized ceramic Indian Runner ducks.

“People just fall in love with them.

We’ve had people buy five at a time.”

But they also sell copper gardening tools, hand-made in Austria under the principles of Viktor Schauberger, one of those Victorians who was ahead of his time on his thinking on the soil and the environment.

The bronze and copper tools apparently help repel slugs and snails and improve the fertility of the soil. They look good too.

But if you really like snails you can buy some resin snail sculptures too – another bestseller at Vflora.

John and Lyn started off doing the shows and launched the website last year, so now have customers all over the world. They also have small outlets in the Tea Pottery at Leyburn and Keswick.

Oh yes, and John’s designed a tea pot too. “It’s based on a dovecote we have in our garden. It was modelled by a designer in Ripon and then made at the Teapottery in a limited edition.”

If you buy one by mail order it comes wrapped in hay and lavender inside the classy Vflora dark green tissue paper.

They will gift-wrap presents and send them direct to the recipients, so all the tricky work is done for you.

Many of their gifts come from small manufacturers, some designed specifically for them and they are planning more unique products plus more made locally.

Among John’s personal favourites of the selection are the Victorian style cloches. “Beautiful to look at but very practical too.

There are also gloves and gauntlets, dibbers, tags, soaps, candles, aprons, hats, very functional fleecy lined Danish rubber boots, bee houses, butterfly houses, ladybirds houses, mugs, kneelers, all the things you’d expect and many more.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering – the name started as Viridiflora – (latin for green flowers – you may have seen the tulips or roses), but John says that really is too hard for people to remember or spell. So he struck on Vflora, which, he says, can mean anything you like.

■ Vflora are at the Teapottery in Leyburn and Keswick, or onvflora.com or phone 0844- 5610733 for a brochure.

MONEY FOR BEGINNERS: Think twice before getting a store card

WOULD you trust the girl behind the make-up counter to sell you the right colour lippy? Maybe.

Would you trust her to sort out your finances? Probably not.

Yet every day hundreds of people cheerfully sign up to a debt on the strength of a sales assistant’s question.

“Would you like the matching eye cream to go with that?” “Would you like a carrier bag?” “Would you be interested in one of our store cards?”

Let us make this clear. Store cards are a sort of loan. Store cards are debt. Store cards can cost you an awful lot of money.

And they are often targeted at younger customers, who are reeled in by the offer of a discount. “Sign up for one of our cards today and you’ll get a ten per cent discount on anything you buy.”

Sounds good? Only if you make the most of the discount and then pay the complete debt off on your first statement.

Otherwise you’re the loser and could be in debt to the store for a very long time.

For the other problem with store cards is that they have very high rates of interest. Often a lot higher than a credit card. Usually around 20 per cent and sometimes nearly 30 per cent. The stores can afford to offer you a ten per cent discount – they’ll probably get that money back and more.

Moneyfacts, a financial information firm, recently worked out that if you bought £1,000 worth of clothes on a store card and made only the minimum payment each month, you could end up paying another £1,000 or more in interest charges. What’s more it would take you between 13 and 15 years to pay it back.

By which time your exciting clothes will long have gone to the charity shop or turned into dusters.

And yes, store card holders get other perks – invitations of preview evenings or special discounts. But if you clear your card every month, then you will probably hear nothing from them. Those invitations only seem to come when you owe them money – so it’s your interest that’s paying for them.

Store cards are frighteningly easy to obtain. Consumer columns and programmes regularly send 18-year-old undercover reporters out into the High Street and they invariably come back with about £10,000 worth of credit. Even if they’re earning no more than the minimum wage and haven’t a clue how they would pay it back.

Yes, things have got a bit tighter in recent years. Stores have been told to be much clearer about interest rates, to publish the details in clearer language and bigger print.

But if someone’s offering you an instant discount if you just sign up, you’d have to be pretty cool headed to read through it all, however clearly it’s spelt out. And anyway, standing by a till in a crowded shop isn’t the best place to fill in forms about finance.

And it’s getting worse again. Now that stores are slashing prices to rock bottom to get rid of their unsold stock, even before Christmas, they have to make their money somewhere. And store cards are an easy option.

So yes, if you can be disciplined, then take the store card, get the discount – and pay the bill at the end of the month.

But maybe it’s better to avoid temptation and never get a store card in the first place.

After all, you wouldn’t take your bank manager’s advice on shopping, so why take a sales assistant’s advice on money?