Echinacea 'Vintage Wine' growing at the Geerlings' Nursery in Lisse, Holland.

Like so many of the PlantSpotters characters, Aad Geerlings was born into the business of growing. He took over first his father’s and then his uncles’ bulb growing businesses in the late 1970s, but it was his wife Elly’s heritage that led him to gradually switch to perennial production.

Aad's wife, Elly, comes from one of the Netherlands’ most influential perennial families. Her father was a perennial grower and her brothers were one of the first big perennials cuttings producers in the area, with the best known of them, Jan Lommerse, being the mentor of another PlantSpotters hybridiser, Mark van Kesteren. Elly Geerlings is also the ‘Eleanora’ referred to in the Aconitum variety, as this was a selection she found herself from A. ‘Bicolor’.

A rare photo of the camera-shy Elly Geerlings, on the far right of the group, in blue.

It was through the Lommerse brothers that Aad Geerlings came into contact with Aad Zoet, at the time when Aad Zoet was just beginning to look for people to grow perennials for export. With a little encouragement from Elly, Aad Geerlings raised his first perennial crop, Peonies. The working relationship with Aad Zoet developed, and together they went on to meet Piet Oudolf and Herbert Oudshoorn and so form Future Plants, for which Aad Geerlings grows many different varieties today at his site in Lisse.