A young market gardener in Lincolnshire, 1820.

Johnsons Seeds traces its start to Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1820. The local historian Roy Hackford, writing for the Boston history site Boston – The Small Town With A Big Story, says the business was begun by William Wade Johnson, a 17-year-old horticulturalist who had come to Boston from Bucknall, reportedly after a falling-out with his father. Johnson sold produce from his market garden at the town’s Wednesday and Saturday markets and, as a keen botanist, began growing on his best plants to harvest seed, which he also sold from his stall.

According to Hackford, demand for that seed grew until, by the start of the twentieth century, Johnsons ran a wholesale and general seed business with customers around the world. Its specialities were kitchen-garden and field crops — peas, beans, beet, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, turnips and seed potatoes — alongside a full range of flower, vegetable and grass seed. In 1911 the company built a new headquarters, warehouse and seed-cleaning plant on London Road in Boston, where seed of every kind was processed before being sent out.

Exports mattered. Hackford writes that the firm kept selling abroad through the depression of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly to the United States and Commonwealth countries, and that this trade ended when war broke out in 1939 and never recovered, because other countries had begun growing their own seed. Grass seed carried the name into sport: he records that Johnsons lawn seed was sown on pitches including Wembley Stadium and the grounds of Arsenal, Leeds United and Nottingham Forest.

Back to the home gardener, then to Suffolk.

The packet-seed brand most British gardeners know dates from a change of direction in the 1960s. Hackford writes that Alfred de Bouys Johnson and his son, also named William Wade Johnson, reviewed the business from top to bottom and decided to re-enter the home retail market with a completely new range of pre-packed flower, vegetable and lawn seeds, together with bulbs. Those packets were sold through garden centres, hardware and DIY shops, department stores and supermarkets. Hackford adds that the Boston warehouse has since gone and that the Johnsons name is now marketed by other seed companies.

The retail business moved to Suffolk. The Johnsons website stated in 2013 that the company was “established in 1820 and purchased by Mr Fothergill’s Seeds in 1998,” and that its offices, storage, packing, warehouse and dispatch shared one site at Kentford, near Newmarket — the home of Mr Fothergill’s. An archived 2002 version of the site already gave Kentford as its press address. That earlier page described Johnsons as a garden-seed range sold only through shops, with a free weather-proof plant label in every packet, organic seed certified by the Organic Farmers and Growers body, and two new collections for 2003, the Plantsmans Range and Cooks’ Garden. It promised flower, vegetable and multi-pack seed in packets with clear photography and detailed growing information.

Later ranges were built on named collaborations. By 2022 the site listed seed collections made with the herb grower Jekka McVicar and the gardener and writer Sarah Raven, alongside a children’s range, Little Gardeners, and said Johnsons was available to buy only in store, as part of its commitment to the retailers that stocked it. The 2013 site also carried World Botanics and World Kitchen collections of flowers and vegetables from other growing traditions.

Seed houses and their names.

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.

One name, two owners and a merger with Woolmans.

Today the Johnsons name is used by two separate businesses. The garden-seed brand belongs to Mr Fothergill’s: a modern slavery statement on the Johnsons website, dated 27 May 2025, describes “Johnsons Seeds, owned by Mr Fothergill’s Seeds Limited,” as part of the Chelsea Holdco Limited group with its head office in the UK and a workforce in East Anglia. Mr Fothergill’s itself has been controlled by funds of Harwood Capital Management since August 2023, the trade site Insight DIY reported. Separately, Johnsons Lawn Seed is a brand of the grass-seed group DLF; its website also gives 1820 as its founding year and describes the brand as part of DLF Seeds.

By October 2026 the Johnsons website had changed character. Titled “Johnsons (Formerly Woolmans),” it sells flowering plants, bulbs and seeds directly to gardeners and explains that Johnsons Seeds and Woolmans have become a single brand, Johnsons. The company says Woolmans was founded by Henry Woolman in 1881, bred, raised and sold chrysanthemums and dahlias, and grew them at a Lincolnshire nursery, and that while “Woolmans as a brand may be no more,” its plants continue under the Johnsons name. The site presents the merged brand as a garden retailer with more than 200 years of experience and addresses its customers as “colour lovers” growing for the border and the vase.

For a design guide, Johnsons shows how a regional seed merchant’s name can outlive its town, its warehouse and its founding family, and end up attached to more than one product line under different owners. Compare it with its sister brand Mr Fothergill’s and with Suttons, another English seed house that left its first home. For this guide we use leaf green, poppy red and packet cream with a classic serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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