About Rammed Roots

Where earth meets growth

Rammed Roots is a family business built on a simple belief: that the most enduring things are made from natural materials, shaped with care, and designed to belong where they stand.

That belief found its first expression in rammed earth - an ancient building technique that transforms raw aggregates, clay, sand and cement into structural walls of extraordinary texture and permanence. It found its second in the soil of Monmouthshire, and the nursery where their plants are grown.

Rammed earth - the origin

The path to rammed earth wasn't a straight one. It began with a deep interest in vernacular architecture - the classical proportions, the ornate facades, the buildings that looked outward from their own time rather than inward toward contemporary convention. Following that thread far enough back through history led, almost inevitably, to rammed earth: a material that predates recorded architecture, and yet remains one of the most honest ways to build.

Today, Rammed Roots designs and builds rammed earth walling systems from the ground up - composing each mix of aggregates, sands, clay and cement to achieve a specific texture, colour and structural character. No two walls are alike. The material is also the medium for a growing body of sculptural and decorative work, where pattern and artistry are given directly to the structure itself.

"Artistry is integral to Rammed Earth - pattern is given to structure itself."

The nursery — a natural next chapter

In 2026, Rammed Roots acquired Border Nurseries, a long-established grower based at Croes Bychan on the Abergavenny Road in Raglan, Monmouthshire. The nursery had built its reputation over many years as one of the few growers in Wales offering the full range of nursery stock, from small shrubs to specimen trees over 25 feet, across more than 600 varieties of ornamental and native species.

For a family already thinking about landscape and material, the fit was instinctive. The plants that inhabit a designed space matter as much as the walls that define it. Under the Rammed Roots name, the nursery continues its work supplying trees, shrubs, hedging and ornamental plants to private customers, landscape contractors, estates and local authorities across Wales, while bringing that stock into closer conversation with the design and build work the family has always done.