Changes are afoot

In autumn I posted on social media that I was about to move house, and would be taking a break for a couple of months while I got settled. The move is now finished, and as part of this transition, I’m making some other big changes to what I do.

I’ll start with the headlines. Things which are changing:

• I won’t be the UK National Collection Holder for tender Tradescantia cultivars anymore. Rowan Violet, based in Cornwall, will be taking on the collection instead.
• I won’t be reopening the shop. I may sell at a small scale occasionally, to the UK only, although I’m not sure when or how yet. I won’t be exporting anymore.
• I won’t be offering “Ask Avery” consultations anymore.
• I’m stepping down as admin of the Tradescantia Hub facebook group. I also expect to be less active on social media overall, probably just making occasional posts about specific news like cultivar registrations.
• I’m closing down the community forum. It never really got used anyway!

Things which are not changing:

• I’ll still be the International Cultivar Registration Authority for Tradescantia and the rest of the Commelinaceae family. I’ll still handle cultivar registrations, and do my best to keep up with unregistered new cultivars and trade names.
• This website will stay up, including the cultivar checklist and all the articles. I’ll keep writing new articles every so often, and sending out news and announcements on the mailing list.
• I’ll still have a Patreon, as a way for people to support this website and my ICRA work and research.
• I’ll still be available for questions, article suggestions, and advice requests via email.
• I’ll still be a plant nerd! I’ve kept my favourites from the collection, I have some ongoing breeding projects in the works, and I still have research to do.

The rest of this article will be a slightly more personal explanation about why I’ve made these decisions, for anyone who’s curious or worried.

Moving house

I mentioned in October that I was about to move house, and that has now happened. I’d actually already been in a haze of housing stress and uncertainty for most of 2025, because I knew I would have to move soon, but had no idea when, and no choice or control over any of it. When it was finally confirmed, I only had a few weeks’ warning and everything happened in a frantic scramble.

Now that I actually have moved, I’m in a much more stable and secure situation and I’m gradually settling in. But my new place is a bit smaller, and I don’t have the outdoor space that I used to.

If that had been the only factor, I would have just found ways to make use of the available space and keep things going. But the forced move also suddenly forced me to think about my priorities as I decided what to leave behind and what my life would look like in my new place. And that forced me to acknowledge that I’ve been on a slow but inexorable path towards burnout with my plant work for some time now.

Burnout

Taking care of hundreds of plant specimens takes a lot of time and effort! Even apart from the practical work of watering and feeding and pruning regularly, I had to constantly monitor them for issues – which really meant part of my attention was permanently dedicated to worrying about them at all times. And the formal National Collection came with other administrative responsibilities like making the plants accessible to the public, and updating an organised database of specimens.

I started the shop as a way to earn money, to pay myself for the work I was putting into research and the collection. And it did earn money. My shop earnings more than covered the direct financial costs of plants, tools, and supplies. But it didn’t provide me with anywhere near a living wage for the amount of time I was spending on the work. If I had hired another person to do the job I was doing, and paid them with every penny of profit from the shop, it would have been illegal.

The UK is small, and so the market for rare expensive tradescantias here is small too. I hoped that branching out into exports would help me reach a wider pool of customers, which it did. But it also required a ridiculous amount of extra work from me to do legally. The high phytosanitary and delivery fees I had to charge meant that each export window would only get just enough orders to be worth going ahead with. And then despite doing absolutely all of the admin and paperwork correctly, about half of the orders in every batch would end up getting lost, damaged, or returned at customs, and I’d have to refund them anyway.

Last year, I made a few more last-ditch attempts to make this work sustainable for me. I got help with social media marketing to try and improve my reach (thanks for all your hard work, Ruth!). I set up a Patreon as a way for people to contribute without having to actually buy things. I started offering paid video consultations to try and get some value directly from my knowledge and experience. But none of them were really successful enough to make a difference.

All the while, I was spending lots of time on facebook running the Tradescantia Hub group. It’s an amazing group with lots of great members, but managing it was a thankless and neverending task. It required constant spam monitoring, checking that posts and comments followed the rules, and responding to reports. The more successful the group became, the more members it had, and the more work was required to run it. And if there was any time left after all that, there were endless posts and questions to actually answer!

Outside of running the facebook group, I was also constantly trying to keep up with the insatiable social media algorithms’ demands for Content, knowing that every day I didn’t publish new posts would make my accounts less visible and ultimately my shop less profitable. I’ve always found social media difficult and uncomfortable, but the harder I worked, the more I needed to post in order to get enough engagement and customers to pay myself for it. It was like being stuck in a hole where my attempts to get out only dug me deeper.

Setting up the Tradescantia Hub Community forum on my website was another last-ditch attempt to escape from the social media trap I’d found myself in. I hoped that having an independent and self-hosted forum would be a way to connect with tradescantia fans at a slower pace and without having to be funneled through the algorithm factory. But that never really took off either, because most people understandably just wanted to stick to the platforms they already knew.

Eventually I had run out of ideas for new things to try, and was slowly running out of energy to keep doing what I was doing. And that’s the context of the situation I was in by October, when I finally confirmed – after months of stressful housing uncertainty – that I would have to move with a few weeks’ notice.

Decisions

Finding a way to squeeze the whole collection into the new place and keep things going as before would have been a huge task. As soon as I thought about the implications of that, it was immediately clear to me that I couldn’t do it. I was already in such a debt of energy and motivation, there was no way I had enough left to set up the whole operation again in a new place, at the same time as moving myself and all the other parts of my life.

If I hadn’t needed to move house, I probably would have come to these same decisions in time. It might have happened a bit later, and maybe a bit slower instead of all at once. But really, this outcome was inevitable, and the move was just a catalyst that made it happen quicker than it would have.

Once I admitted to myself that I was going to downsize things, it was surprisingly easy to think through what I actually wanted to keep and what I wanted to get rid of. The National Collection, the shop, the facebook group and social media – all of those were things that have consistently been making me a “loss” in time and energy for at least the last year or two. But the ICRA work, the checklist, my research, and my own favourite plants and breeding projects – those are the things that I actually still want to be spending my time on.

So I’ve been preparing to wind things down. Some are being passed on to new stewards. I’ve been coordinating with and sending plants to Rowan Violet so they can continue the National Collection in Cornwall. The facebook group will live on in the capable hands of its existing admin and mod team, who have already been managing just fine without me for several months while I was busy with the move!

Other things will just end for good. Without the National Collection, I won’t have enough plants and sales to be worth maintaining a whole shop website. When I occasionally want to sell, I’ll handle it on a small scale using paypal transactions or similar. And I don’t think anyone will particularly notice or miss the community forum and online consultations when they stop being available.

I’m sad to be losing some of these things. But mostly I’m excited to have some time and energy freed up to focus on the parts I do love. I’m leaving up the Patreon, so that people can carry on contributing to the direct costs of the ICRA research and the website itself. As I recover from the move, I’m looking forward to catching up on some of my ongoing research, getting my favourite plants comfortable in their new homes, and registering some exciting new seedlings I bred last year. As well as finding out what other new things I have time for outside of the plant world.

Conclusions

A lot of this article has been quite negative. It has been a difficult year. I know some people will be shocked and disappointed about these changes, and I’m sorry they’ve come so suddenly and without warning. So I wanted to explain honestly why I was making them and how much thought has gone into them.

I also don’t want anyone to worry about me too much. My housing situation is now finally secure, which is an amazing relief. And I’m very proud of everything I’ve done with the National Collection, the shop, and all of my work over the years. I’ve learned a lot, and I think I’ve helped others too. I’m grateful to all the new people I’ve got to know and work with.

And this isn’t the end either. I’m still the ICRA, this website will still run, and you can still email me any time. I’m still a plant nerd, and I’m still going to keep doing plant nerd things! Letting some parts go means that I can enjoy and work harder at the parts I’m keeping.