A corn merchant’s business in Reading.

Suttons began in Reading, Berkshire, in 1806. Its founder, John Sutton, was a corn factor and miller with a small trade in farm seed, the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) at the University of Reading says in a 2023 history of the firm; English Wikipedia says the business first traded as corn merchants, known as the “House of Sutton.”

The turn to garden seed came from his sons. Martin Hope Sutton and Alfred Sutton joined in 1832, Wikipedia says, and MERL credits Martin Hope with opening an account with a London seed wholesaler, drawing up the firm’s first balance sheet and producing its first catalogue in 1831–32. Wikipedia says Martin Hope became a partner in 1836, when the firm traded as Sutton & Son, and that in 1837 the business moved to Reading’s Market Place and widened its range into flower and vegetable seeds. By the end of that decade, MERL says, garden seed made up 42 per cent of the stock.

Testing became part of the firm’s character early. Both MERL and Wikipedia date the company’s own laboratory for testing seed for germination and purity to 1840, and Wikipedia notes that the Great Western Railway, which had just reached Reading, helped the mail-order trade. In 1858, MERL says, the firm became Sutton & Sons and received royal patronage, and its printed material often called it “the Queen’s Seedsmen”; Wikipedia says Queen Victoria asked Martin Hope Sutton that year to supply seed to the royal household. A seed display cabinet held by MERL, dated to the 1800s, carries the words “Queen’s Seedsmen Reading” on its base.

The catalogue grew into a fixture of the firm. Oregon State University’s special collections hold digitised copies of Sutton’s Amateur’s Guide in Horticulture and General Garden Seed Catalogue, published by Sutton & Sons Ltd of Reading, including the 1917 and 1921 issues.

War, law and a move west.

The twentieth century tied the firm to national policy. Wikipedia says Suttons opened a branch in Calcutta, India, in 1912. In 1915, MERL says, seed production was made a reserved occupation, so Suttons staff were exempt from military service, and after the Seeds Act of 1920 made seed testing a legal requirement, the company’s testing station was among those licensed by the government. During the Second World War, MERL says, Suttons distributed seed for staple crops under the “Dig for Victory” campaign and printed a 1941 catalogue urging gardeners to grow their own food.

Reading was home for more than a century and a half. Wikipedia says the firm moved in 1962 to new premises on the A4, the London-to-Bath road, east of the town; MERL ties its introduction of recyclable foil packets for amateur gardeners to that period, while Wikipedia dates the foil packets to 1965. In 1976 the company moved to Torquay, in Devon, and in 1998 to Paignton, where it is based today, according to Wikipedia. Its records stayed behind: MERL and the University of Reading’s Special Collections hold the archive, and MERL says it keeps more than 100 objects made or used by the firm, among them sacks, signs and seeds.

MERL’s history names Suttons Seeds Ltd as the current company and lists recent measures it has taken, including less plastic packaging, investment in solar power, peat-free compost and an end to the use of neonicotinoids.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all seed companies from Britain, France and Germany: Suttons, Vilmorin, Chiltern Seeds, Real Seeds, Unwins, Mr Fothergill’s and Bingenheimer Saatgut. Seed companies sit at many different points in the trade, from small specialist catalogues run by a handful of people to names that now belong to much larger horticultural groups, and a single brand can be sold through garden centres, supermarkets, mail-order catalogues and websites at once.

Some of them sell F1 hybrid varieties, bred from two parent lines, whose saved seed does not come true; others concentrate on open-pollinated varieties, which gardeners can save and re-sow. Some sell organic or biodynamic seed, certified to the standards of an inspection body, and some work with networks of growers who multiply the seed on their own farms.

A seed brand’s identity is usually carried less by the seed itself than by a name, a catalogue and the packet — the picture of the plant, the variety name and the sowing instructions — because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved where its seed is grown or packed, 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 produced and packed.

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

From the Vilmorin group to Thompson & Morgan.

For part of its modern history Suttons belonged to a French group. Wikipedia says that until 2014 it was part of the Vilmorin group, the seed business controlled by Limagrain. On 1 December 2014 a management buyout took effect, the company announced that month: commercial director David Robinson became managing director and led the buyout with operations director Rufus Roberts, with Limagrain, through Vilmorin, helping the deal and remaining a trading partner, and with support from Torbay Council. The company said then that the Suttons group, including the Carters and Dobies of Devon names, would carry on from Paignton; Horticulture Week covered the buyout on 2 December 2014.

Six years later the business changed hands again. In November 2020, Insight DIY reported, Thompson & Morgan of Ipswich bought all of the shares of Suttons Seeds Ltd, together with the Suttons, Dobies and Organic Catalogue brands; both companies said Suttons would stay in Paignton, and Robinson said he and Roberts had owned and run it since 2014. Thompson & Morgan has owned Suttons since 2020.

The royal link has continued. In December 2024 the trade site The Dirt reported that Suttons had been granted a Royal Warrant of Appointment as seedsmen to King Charles III; Chris Wright, chief executive of Branded Garden Products, called it recognition of the range, and the report said the company grows most of its plants at a nursery in Devon, where they are trialled and tested.

For a design guide, Suttons shows how a seed house can carry a nineteenth-century identity — the catalogue, the testing laboratory, the royal title — through changes of town and owner. Compare Thompson & Morgan, its owner since 2020, and Vilmorin, the French seed house whose group owned Suttons until 2014. For this guide we use a trial-ground green, cream and a wheat gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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