A seed and bird shop on the Seine.

Vilmorin traces itself to 1743 and a shop on the Quai de la Mégisserie, on the right bank of the Seine in Paris. French Wikipedia, citing Gustave Heusé’s 1899 family history Les Vilmorin, describes a seed and bird shop at number 4 under the sign of the Coq de la Bonne Foy, run by Jeanne Diffetot; her daughter Claude Geffroy was admitted as a master seed merchant in 1743 and married Pierre Andrieux, botanist and seed supplier to Louis XV. English Wikipedia names Claude Geoffroy and Pierre Andrieux as the founders.

The Vilmorin name arrived by marriage. In 1774 Philippe-Victoire Lévêque de Vilmorin married the Andrieux couple’s daughter, and French Wikipedia says the house of Vilmorin-Andrieux was created in 1775. English Wikipedia says Philippe-Victoire had begun importing trees and plants from 1766, among them the American tulip tree, and French Wikipedia credits him with bringing in the field beet.

Limagrain, which owns the business today, dates another first step to the same year: in a January 2024 article marking 280 years of the brand, the group says Vilmorin began selling seeds in packets in 1766, and that over the following decades it brought vegetables with unusual names to France, pioneered sugar beet during the Napoleonic blockade and helped Parmentier make the potato a staple food. Those are the company’s own accounts of its history.

A family of botanists at Verrières.

For generations the firm was a family enterprise, and the family were botanists as well as merchants. English Wikipedia lists a succession of heirs who led the house from Verrières-le-Buisson, south of Paris, among them Louis (1816–1860), Elisa (1826–1868), Henry (1843–1899) and André (1907–1987). French Wikipedia says Philippe André de Vilmorin acquired the Verrières estate, a former hunting lodge of Louis XIV, in 1815, and turned its walled park into a place to acclimatise trees and shrubs from around the world; the Arboretum Vilmorin there is still private and still looked after by the Vilmorin family, advised by a scientific committee of tree specialists.

The family’s science fed the business. English Wikipedia credits Louis de Vilmorin with an 1856 paper on creating a new race of beet and on heredity in plants, and describes it as groundwork for modern plant breeding. The firm also published: the Internet Archive holds copies of The Vegetable Garden, an English edition of the Vilmorin-Andrieux et Cie work on garden vegetables edited by William Robinson, in a New York edition by E.P. Dutton dated 1920 and a 1981 reprint by Ten Speed Press of Berkeley, California.

The house kept the joined name for a long time, trading as Vilmorin-Andrieux and later Vilmorin-Andrieux et Cie, French Wikipedia says, before the twentieth-century changes of ownership that took it out of Paris.

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 family to Limagrain.

The family era ended in the 1970s. French Wikipedia says René Hodée bought the company in 1972 and moved it to La Ménitré, in the Maine-et-Loire, and sold it to the farmers’ cooperative Groupe Limagrain in 1975; Limagrain says Vilmorin Jardin and Vilmorin-Mikado joined the group that year. Limagrain has owned Vilmorin since 1975.

Under Limagrain the name split between professional and amateur markets. French Wikipedia says the company became Vilmorin SA in 1986, was listed on the Paris stock exchange as Vilmorin & Cie in 1993 and renamed Vilmorin Clause & Cie in 1997, and that a 1989 restructuring created Oxadis, the unit for amateur gardeners that became Vilmorin Jardin. In April 2023, Les Échos reported, Limagrain announced it would buy the shares in Vilmorin & Cie it did not already hold. The garden business was once put up for sale: in June 2008 Reuters reported that Vilmorin planned to sell its consumer activities, among them Oxadis in France and Suttons in Britain, and that completion of the agreed sale of Oxadis to Plan SAS had been postponed. Limagrain lists Vilmorin Jardin among its businesses today. The holding company, the professional vegetable-seed business Vilmorin-Mikado, a subsidiary renamed in 2016–17 according to French Wikipedia, and the garden brand are separate entities that share the name.

For gardeners, the brand is the packet. Limagrain describes Vilmorin Jardin as its garden-products business, selling flower, vegetable and grass seed, bulbs, potting compost, garden equipment and books under the Vilmorin name, alongside Gondian, which it dates to 1880, and Vita by Vilmorin, through garden centres, DIY stores, food shops and online. Vilmorin’s own website carries the line “Grainetier depuis 1743,” seed merchant since 1743.

For a design guide, Vilmorin shows how a family name, a Paris address and a founding year can become the whole identity of a seed packet. Compare Baumaux, another French seed catalogue, and Suttons, the English seed house that belonged to the Vilmorin group until 2014. For this guide we use a potager green, cream and a beetroot red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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