Welcome to the Toobees Collection
A collection of rare and unusual succulents and cacti from around the world put together by Bob and Beryl Potter.
What is the Toobees Collection?
Put simply, it is a collection of rare and unusual succulents and cacti housed under 140 square metres of glass.
In order to fully answer this question we need to explore a little of the history behind the collection.
I obtained my first cactus plant from my Grandfather when I was just three years old. It was an old specimen of Chamacereus silvestrii and I can still recall the time he put the heavily budded plant in front of the open coal fire in order to make the flowers fully open. From that moment I was hooked on cactus plants and by visiting Woolworths with my pocket money and occasional trips to a cactus nursery my collection of plants gradually increased.
Before you all drop off to sleep or move over to some other nonsense on U Tube , lets fast forward a few years to 1970. By now I am married to Beryl and we are living in Rainham in Kent with a lovely new greenhouse full of a nice mix of cactus and succulent plants.
Jumanery Nursery was just a few miles away and the Medway Branch of the BCSS, one of the best branches in the country met at Rochester every month. (More about this later, if you are interested) So in March 1973 we left Rainham for me to take up a new job in The Yemen. Yes that’s right The Yemen. For some reason back in the seventies it was always called The Yemen, possibly because it’s rightful name was The Yemen Arab Republic. Now of course it’s usually only referred to as Yemen.
We had a great time in Yemen, such a beautiful country and lovely people, what a shame that it is now in such a state. After 3 years in Yemen I did another 9 months in Sudan and then it was time to return home and resurrect the hobby that was put on hold while we were away. I had brought back a lot of interesting plants from Yemen and Sudan and before long I was producing a lot of spare plants which were given away to various members of the society. (See Travel Diaries)
In 1978 we moved house from Rainham in Kent to Woking in Surrey and soon decided to form a small nursery run from our back garden, initially out of one greenhouse which very quickly became 3 greenhouses. This was the beginning of Toobees Nursery, which started to flourish and we produced twice yearly plant lists and began mail order and welcomed many visitors to our garden greenhouses.
My personal interest was mainly succulents rather than cacti and in 1989 myself and Beryl took off to Madagascar for a wonderful 3 weeks of plant hunting, again bringing back many unusual plants to enhance our propagating stock. (See Travel Diaries)
In 1992 British Rail decided that they were going to put on a large flower show at Hampton Court and we were applied to exhibit our plants there and possibly sell some of our plants to the general public, it was for us a great success and we soon got bitten by the showing bug.
For the next 14 years we showed at most of the RHS shows in the country, (Hampton Court, Gardeners World Live at the NEC, Malvern Spring and Autumn shows, Harrogate Flower Show, RHS Halls at Westminster and Chelsea Flower Show where we won a Gold Medal at our first attempt) we also did many smaller provincial shows and in order to keep up demand for our plants we needed to move to a larger nursery. We eventually found a place in Blackhorse Road Woking just a few miles from our house where we sold not only our cacti and succulents but many more exotic plants and we renamed our nursery Toobees Exotics.
We eventually gave up the major shows in 2006 and reverted to our initial roots of just selling Madagascan and African succulents but this time from a smaller nursery site just across the road from our old nursery. We eventually ceased trading as Toobees Exotics in 2016 and subsequently turned our small nursery greenhouse into a show house of succulents with many of my specimen plants being bedded out in display areas. My home greenhouse was also similarly turned into a display area with my personal plants.
These two greenhouses now go under the banner of The Toobees Collection which is the subject of this web site. I hope to make this site an important port of call for anyone interested in succulents and will have posts detailing my extensive overseas travel on plant hunting expeditions and also posting on a regular basis information on many unusual succulents. Please click here to visit our shop where you can purchase some rare and unusual plants from my propagations.
As the site will be under development on an ongoing basis please be patient, but we hope you will continue to look at our site and come along for the ride with us.
Best wishes from Bob and Beryl