A seed trade in the Harz foothills.

SPERLI dates its story to 1788. The company’s history page says the business that became SPERLI GmbH was founded that year by Samuel Lorenz Ziemann in Quedlinburg, the old town on the northern edge of the Harz, and that in the nineteenth century the seed-growing tradition was carried on by Gustav Andrees Sperling. The family name is also the German word for sparrow, and the brand has leaned on the bird ever since: in 2005 the company’s website invited visitors to click on a sparrow and meet the “Sperli-Spatz,” its garden-expert mascot.

Quedlinburg’s own records back up the link between the names. German Wikipedia’s article on the Fleischhof, a listed farmstead in the town, says that in 1899 its owner was Sam. Lor. Ziemann, who ran an ornamental and market nursery there, and that the seed merchant Carl Sperling is thought to have rebuilt part of the yard, probably between 1925 and 1935, after taking it over from his father Walter Sperling. The same article says the Sperling family gave up its seat in Quedlinburg in 1948, and that Walter Sperling was still listed as owner in 1950. The buildings are now part of the town’s German timber-framing centre.

The company account picks up the story in the 1930s. It says Hans Hevekerl joined in 1935 as master seed breeder and took over the management of the firm in 1939. In 1945 the business moved west to Bevensen in Lower Saxony, and after the Quedlinburg seat was given up in 1948 it moved again, in 1955, to Lüneburg. In 1968 Andrees Hevekerl, whom the company describes as a grandson of Walter Sperling, joined and led the firm in what it counts as the sixth generation.

From Lüneburg to the Münsterland.

For decades SPERLI was a Lüneburg name. Archived versions of the company’s website from 2000 and 2005 greet visitors as “Sperli Samen Lüneburg,” and the 2005 version gives the trading company as Carl Sperling & Co, a GmbH & Co. KG with an address on Hamburger Straße in Lüneburg. The Sperling name, in other words, stayed on the company long after the family had left Quedlinburg.

By 2013 the picture had changed. The imprint of the SPERLI website archived in October that year names SPERLI GmbH in Everswinkel, a town in the Münsterland near Münster, with Nicolaus Volmary and Werner Großeschallau as managing directors. The same two people are the managing directors of Bruno Nebelung GmbH, the seed company behind Kiepenkerl, and both companies give the same street address in Everswinkel. The SPERLI imprint still did so when we checked in October 2026.

Nebelung’s own history says it was founded on 1 July 1925 in Münster by Bruno Nebelung and Franz Volmary as a specialist seed trader, began breeding its own varieties after buying the Kaldenhof estate near Münster in 1947, and moved to its present site in Everswinkel in 1994 and 1995. It describes itself as a family business in its third generation, led by Nico Volmary. On its brands page Nebelung lists SPERLI alongside Kiepenkerl, Hegemeister Kiepenkerl, Majestic and Pegasus, which makes SPERLI a sister brand of Kiepenkerl inside one family-owned company. The date on which the Lüneburg business passed to Nebelung is not given in the company pages we used, so this guide dates the Everswinkel arrangement from the 2013 imprint.

What SPERLI sells has stayed close to its roots: packets of vegetable, flower and herb seed for home gardeners, along with pulses, green-manure crops, lawn seed and flower bulbs. The company says every variety it buys in is checked on its own trial fields before it goes into the range; it sums this up as “only the best goes into the packet.” Nebelung says the strongest growth is in SPERLI’s BIO-Vielfalt, a range of varieties from organic production that now runs across most of its product groups.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all garden seed names: Park Seed, Select Seeds, Johnsons Seeds, Kiepenkerl, Sperli, Higgledy Garden and Seedaholic. Seed brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to larger horticultural groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a garden centre rack to a mail-order catalogue or a website.

A seed brand’s identity is usually carried less by the seed itself than by a packet, a catalogue and a name, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its packing or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its seed is packed and sent from.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where it packs and ships its seed and how its packets and catalogues have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name, a bird and a seed packet.

SPERLI’s identity rests on a name with several layers. It is a family name, carried from Quedlinburg through Bevensen to Lüneburg; it is the German word for a common garden bird; and, in the short form the company writes in capitals, it is the name on its seed packets. The company’s current slogan, “SPERLI – wächst Dir ans Herz!” (roughly “SPERLI grows on you”), plays on gardening language in the same light way the Sperli-Spatz mascot did on its early website.

The brand also carries a long timeline lightly. Its history page moves from an eighteenth-century nursery in a Harz town to a modern seed company, and the Fleischhof in Quedlinburg, where the Ziemann and Sperling names appear in the property records, gives that story a physical place. Today the brand is run from the Münsterland by the same managers as Kiepenkerl, but it keeps its own name, website and slogan, and Nebelung lists it on its brands page as a brand in its own right.

For a design guide, SPERLI shows how a seed brand can turn a surname into a character and keep it through moves, new owners and two centuries of packets. Compare Kiepenkerl, its sister brand under Bruno Nebelung, and Bingenheimer Saatgut, another German seed house. For this guide we use seedling green, sparrow brown and marigold with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SPERLI’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.