Stephen H Smith’s Garden Centre

Visted here yesterday with wife, my father 91, and mother in law 88. Dad has been coming here for years from his home in Keighley. The Garden Centre itself is a good size with a pretty good range of plants and garden things. Also plenty of gift items and also an Edinburgh Wool Shop. The prices for garden stuff are horrendous ! In many cases about double what they should be, and I would never buy any garden things here. Would you pay £49 for a metal watering can or even £19.99 for a plastic one ??? ! Plants and shrubs are also ridiculously priced. We have a large Garden Centre near us on the Wirral which I also regard as expensive, but this place is a complete rip-​off. An Acer palmatum tree was £245 compared with £159 for a similar size at Gordale (Wirral). We paid £59.99 for a smaller one two years ago which is larger now than Stephen Smith one at £245. We also visit a large ‘posh’ Garden Center (van Haags) near Ware in Herts (near my daughters), and their prices are lower than here. We had a main meal at Hatties Restaurant as described by the previous reviewer. Main courses £7−8. The fish and chips were reasonably good„ except batter was a bit anaemic, but Ive had worse. Summarising, its OK for an afternoon out, but dont buy plants here, you will get twice as many for you moeny at a smaller garden centre.

When you’re looking for somewhere to eat while you’re on the road, a Garden Centre isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. But, several such places have a restaurant attached, and some of them are very good. An excellent one is ‘Hattie’s Carvery’, attached to the Stephen H. Smith Garden Centre in Otley, Yorkshire. All the meals here seem excellent, and extremely good value for money. Some dishes are served cafeteria-​style, while others are cooked to order like the fish and chips which I had. I needed to wait about 15 minutes for them to be brought to me, but they contained a large fish, and generous portions of chips and mushy peas, and were piping hot. Well worth the wait, I thought. If there is one county that’s said to serve the best fish and chips, it’s Yorkshire and these rightly take their place as some of the best in the county. And, the garden centre is not bad, either!

It was a cold miserable Sunday, we’d spent a long time forcing ourselves from under the warm duvet and once finally roused I wanted to go out and do something. Nothing crazy exciting, but something out and about nonetheless. So, I informed my boyfriend that we were going to a garden centre. It was either that or shopping, so you can guess which he chose. (I’m not really that much of a dragon, but if I hadn’t we’d have mooched all our Sunday away in the house.)
So. After losing our way past Ilkley, and with a little help from my iPhone, we made our way to the Smith Stephen H Garden Centre. Joy! First off, it’s huge. A veritable maze of rooms, not exclusively related to the garden, but full of browsing items all the same. The first room we wandered through was the indoor plants section. There was a reasonable amount of variety, with exciting cacti and carnivorous plants to behold, and a number of lovely primroses, cyclamen and more. I’m not an expert at flora names, so for the purposes of the review, I’ll do my best to describe the things I liked!
The next room held a number of exciting canvass prints and artwork, a range of different fire contraptions for the garden, water features and a number of other garden furniture items. There was a food section, hosting jams, chutneys, snacks, cordials and all other things that give a farmers market vibe. Onward we went and discovered the outdoor plant section. A cornucopia of shrubs, bushes, hedges and other exotic plants were there for the viewing. Sadly, as it is February, the majority weren’t in bloom so perhaps it was a poor choice of Sundays to browse. However, the more avid gardener would more than likely have the imagination to picture an end result with the variety on display!
The prices were really rather reasonable with many of the pots retailing at far cheaper than I’ve seen at, say, B&Q. However, for some reason the bay and olive trees were a lot more expensive than the ones I’d bought previously at B&Q. Go figure. I ended up purchasing a sort of grassy tree indoor house plant and an orchid-​esque exotic looking plant too. Neither have labels, so my guess is as good as yours in terms of the names for these plants! Here’s hoping I manage to keep them alive without instruction… I also bought a minuscule leaf plant whose green leaves have pink lines, which look like weird veins. We both liked that.
All in all, this lovely centre is well worth a browse. If you’re impatient, like us, you won’t spend more than an hour or so inside but it will be an hour well spent for some Sunday browsing. I can tell I’ll be back! (I want a Venus Fly Trap for starters…)

I love this garden centre, it’s nice to visit one that isn’t a national chain and that has some more unusual plant offerings.
There is a huge selection of just about everything at Stephen Smiths; a fantastic arts and crafts department; House plants and garden plants, shrubs and trees; Aquatic and pet supplies; greetings cards, crockery, teas and coffees, seeds, homemade cakesthe list goes onoh and a little christmassy grotto area at that seasonal time. There’s so much to buy here I’m sure I’ve forgotten something.
So why do I like it so much? I’m not sure, probably the huge choice of everything there, and it’s a ‘local’ shop, and as a keeno gardeny type I love the huge variety of all things green. There’s also a big selection of garden pots, in every shape and size, as well as every style.
The café also had a huge refurbishment a year and a half ago and it’s now a million times better than before. A nice spot to pause in while perusing the selection on offer in this garden centre.