Business blooms despite garden centre closures

Whether you have a window box or a grand, herbaceous border, Easter weekend is traditionally one of the busiest times in the gardening calendar.

Garden centres and nurseries around the country will be heaving with customers stocking up on summer bedding, perennials and shrubs. This year, because of good weather, there should be a jump in profits.

Tomorrow, however, they will be closed. Trading laws forbid large shops – ie, those more than 280sq m – from opening at all on Easter Sunday or Christmas Day. Store operators who break the 1994 Sunday Trading Act face fines of up to £50,000. For the big garden centres, this is a blow. The Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) calculates that garden centres could make 40 per cent more if itwere not for the closure.

This Sunday, the Garden Centre Group (GCG), which owns Wyevales and Blooms, and several other garden centre chains including Hilliers, will open parts of its stores in protest for the second year running.

Customers will be allowed to browse and use the restaurants at 73 centres, as they did last year for the first time. GCG got round the law in 2010 by making Easter Sunday a "members' day".

The Keep Sunday Special campaign argues that we are becoming a nation of shopaholics and that people need to rest and spend time with their families. The inconsistency of the legislation is highlighted at GCG's Syon Park garden centre in Brentford, West London. A rare plants fair is held in the grounds of Syon House every Easter Sunday, but the garden centre next door is forbidden to sell plants.

The HTA is submitting a response to the Government's Red Tape Challenge, which is designed to highlight unnecessary and unpopular legislation. It will recommend that laws on Sunday trading are relaxed to allow longer opening hours for all garden centres and trading on Easter Sunday.

In retaliation, the Keep Sunday Special campaign will ask supporters to keep a close eye on their local garden centres and not hesitate to seek guidance from their district council or unitary authority if they believe that the law is being broken.