Hello — we’re Emily & Ana, the founders of Seedball, The Original Seedball Company.
We started Seedball in 2011 with a simple idea: to make it easy for anyone to help bring wildflowers back — starting with their own garden.
At the time, native wildflowers were disappearing fast, and growing them successfully felt complicated and inaccessible. Drawing on our backgrounds in conservation science, we began experimenting with a simple clay-and-compost seedball method designed to help seeds survive and establish where loose seed often fails. That idea became Seedball — and over the years it has helped introduce seedballs to gardens, schools and communities across the UK.
Our mission has always been to increase the abundance of British wildflowers — and the bees, butterflies and wildlife that depend on them. We believe that nature recovery doesn’t need huge land ownership or expert knowledge. When we each use the space we have — whether that’s a garden, balcony, window box or small patio — those individual actions connect to create something far bigger.
Over the past 50 years the UK has seen dramatic declines in pollinators and garden wildlife. But we genuinely believe this is something we can change — together. Seedball exists to make that change feel hopeful, practical and achievable.
Conservation sits at the heart of everything we do. Our long-term dream is to use Seedball to help fund and create our own wildflower reserves — turning everyday gardening into lasting habitat for nature.
Thank you for being part of the Seedball journey.
We’re so glad you’re growing with us !!
Emily & Ana
Through The Years
2010/11
At this time we were both still working at Aberdeen University, finishing off our PhD's (both in conservation related topics). We developed the idea for wildflower seed balls having had a terrible time ourselves trying to grow wildflowers (to help the bees!) when we came across the work of Masanobu Fukuoka. A Japanese natural farming innovator, Fukuoka strongly promoted using seed balls for sowing crops in desert areas with unpredictable rainfall – the clay balls prevented the seeds from being eaten until the rains arrive and seed germination starts. We quickly realised we could apply the same concept to wildflower seeds and help protect the seeds from predators. We spent the next two years testing and developing our Seedball recipe!
2012
On Ana’s kitchen table, we made lots of Seedballs to go in very home made packaging for our first Seedball ‘product’ and visited a whole bunch of fairs and market stalls with Rigby the Seedball puppy. We had so much fun!
2013
We launched the ‘Seedball Tin’ !!
2014-16
We built a shed! The Seedball team grew and we were stocked in about 150 shops (including Kew Gardens) and featured in the Guardian Christmas Gift Guide!
2017
We won two amazing awards! Gift of the Year (Eco Friendly Category) and Garden Retail Awards (Best New Gardening Growing Product). And we built another garden shed.
2018
We moved out of the garden!! Our team is now 14!! Including Rigby. And we were on the telly! Channel 4’s Buy It Now (Episode 13) – a show where you have to pitch your product to the audience and a panel of retailers – scary but oh so much fun too! We also launched a range in collaboration with the Natural History Museum – we are still pinching ourselves about !
2019
We made super cute matchboxes for wedding favours (and won an award for these too!) and we have something very exciting up our sleeve too to announce later in the year!! Still loving what we do!!
2020-2021
We hibernated a little during the covid years, but kept on developing new products, launching our promotional matchboxes, grab bags and a Wildlife Trust collaboration (Artist Meadow Tin). We also won the P.E.A Nature Award!
2022
Everything was go go go! We moved into a downstairs unit (no more carrying boxes and balls up and down stairs hurrah!), our team reached 22 people and we made 1,000,000 seed balls for the BBC to be donated to schools as part of The Green Planet TV series.
2023
It’s been ten years since we launched the Seedball tin! Crazy! In this time we’ve sold over 30 million seed balls - enough to cover 210 football pitches! This year we launched our new ‘Tube Range' and we’re exhibiting at Chelsea Flower Show in the Spring, do come say hi!
