THE original owner of a garden centre destroyed in a blaze this week has spoken of her sadness at the news.

Blooms Garden Centre, on Newport Road, St Mellons, was ravaged by fire which started accidentally on Wednesday night and is now a shell of its former self.

Originally a plant nursery, the site was first cultivated by Jean Hughes, from Newport, who set up what was then Uskley Nursery in the 1950s with her brother Malcolm Andrew, when they were just 19 and 24.

Upon finishing her horticultural studies at Studley College in Warwickshire, she joined her brother, a former Usk Institute student, at the 10-acre site which had been bought for them by their father John Andrew.

A report printed in a gardening magazine on September 17, 1954, records that the pair named it “Uskley” as a permanent reminder of their student days.

“When we started, it was just 10 acres of field and nothing else,” recalled Mrs Hughes, 78, whose brother died three years ago.

“By the time my brother sold it, it had an acre of glass houses. We couldn’t have any days off because we had boilers that had to be stoked and to give the tomatoes ventilation. Later, it was all automated and that gave us more time off.

“My brother did all the work, I left and got married after about five years and I didn’t do so much then. We didn’t take any salary and expanded it that way. We grew tomatoes, chrysanthemums and lettuce on rotation.

“We thought about turning it into a garden centre, but it would have cost thousands to change the layout,” said Mrs Hughes.

Relatives still live in the houses built by Mr Andrew on site: “They were very lucky that the flames were going towards the golf course on Wednesday and not towards the houses.

“It is all gutted down there. It’s just all black and terrible. Malcolm would be mortified if he could see it now.”

The Andrew family, who sold the site in the 1980s, suffered their own business disaster when heavy snowfall settled on the greenhouses and caused the glass to crack, damaging a whole crop of chrysanthemums.

Now all that remains of the large greenhouses which Mrs Hughes remembers is buckled and twisted metal.

“It’s nothing to do with us now at all, but I don’t know if they will ever put a garden centre there again,” she said. “It is very sad to think that all that work is gone.”

A Blooms spokeswoman said the garden centre would remain closed for the forseeable future.

Blooms Garden Centre was destroyed while three units to the right, Edinburgh Woollen Mill, PamPurred pets and PandonHome, were all secure but without power on Thursday.

Yesterday morning the fire service said a small hotspot was still smouldering at the site as it was re-inspected by crews at 8am, when it was described as “dangerously inaccessible”.