Two separate garden centres - one in Devon and the other in Rutland - have revealed that they have been forced to close down.
In Paignton, Parkbay Garden Centre is likely to cease trading in the middle of next month, with owner John Britton selling the land for housing. He told diyweek.net that the decision had been taken following a series of tussles with Torbay Council.

He said that he had owned the land on which the garden centre stood for some time, and back in 2003 had plans to build a store on it which would be leased to B&Q.

"We tried to get planning permission for retail, and that was more or less the agreement," he said. "But then the council felt retail wasn't right here, and that houses were right."

So, six years ago, Mr Britton bought the garden centre on the site. "We had a lot of land we couldn't do anything with," he explained. "We hadn't planned to run a garden centre but we've learned to trade as a garden centre, hoping we'd manage to obtain planning permission for retail."

In fact, though, outline planning permission has now been received for around 95 houses on the land - but Mr Britton has been unable to raise sufficient funds to finance the development himself so is selling up to a developer.

He said he felt very sad to be closing the garden centre down. "I found the industry to be one of the nicest industries I've ever been in," he said, "but we've been marking time. We wanted to open another garden centre - but we couldn't get planning permission for this site. I'll probably retire now," he added.

The closure of the centre will result in the loss of eight jobs.

Meanwhile, Greetham Garden Centre in Greetham, Rutland has already closed its doors for the last time, a victim of this year's dreadful weather.

The business posted a message to customers on its Facebook page, which said: "We have had to make the hard decision to close Greetham Garden Centre.

"Several things have been stacked against us, not least this year's atrocious weather, which has been bad enough to deal with on a personal level, but absolutely nightmarish in a trade which relies so heavily upon it.

"Thank you to all our customers for your support," it added.