season (November to January), when most of them sell goods related to Christmas, such as decorations and festive plants. Additionally, it is now not abnormal for garden centres to experience their peak season within the winter months, due to the surge in popularity of garden centres around Christmas time. A garden centre offers more products and services than the traditional nursery which mainly retails plants. Garden centres offer not only garden supplies but also leisure buildings, garden furniture, products for pets and fish keeping, and giftware and home products, up-market farm shop style food offerings are also becoming the norm in many garden centres. Many larger centres also have florist departments, wild bird care and their own restaurants. They have also diversified into the Christmas market heavily supplying such goods as traditional Christmas Trees, decorations and novelty and seasonal foods. Garden centres include concessions that are either operated as manned, unmanned or short-term promotional businesses. They trade under a lease and licence contract which govern the business relationship. Garden centre concessions use their own branding, employ their own personnel and transact their sales through their own tills. The concessions are granted a degree of exclusivity to retail their product ranges which are complementary to the garden centre. The oldest garden centre in the UK was, until 2014, Anlex in West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. This had traded in latter years under the 'Plant and Harvest' and 'Flowerland' brandings A walled garden, built as the kitchen gardens for the Dashwood Estate, it had been selling plants since 1775, sold plants and sundries and had a cafe and farm shop. In 2007, the retailer Tesco made a move into the garden centre market through acquisition, resulting in 2008 in the purchase of the Dobbies chain. They later sold the chain in 2016, to focus on their core supermarket business. United States The United States retail garden-center market contained roughly 16,000 independently operated companies in 2010 according to Research and Markets. The combined annual revenue for the lot of them is about $30 billion. Most garden centers are independently owned. There are some regional chains, but there is no national US garden center chain, unlike in the UK where there are several. However, both of the largest home improvement stores in the US—Lowe's and The Home Depot—refer to their gardening departments as garden centers and larger hardware stores have "Lawn and Garden" departments. Some of