Our History

 

Mr. Andrew Tse, the founder, established the company in 1929. He was an excellent gardener, in order to pursue his interests in gardening, he purchased a piece of land in Shouson Hill and started to grow vegetables and flowers on his farm. In addition to obtaining seeds from the local market, he also spent his days collecting better quality, and different varieties of seeds from other countries. As one of the first persons who introduced high quality seeds from western countries, Andrew started to expand his interests from personal hobby to develop seed retail and wholesale business to the local market. During the time in 1950s and 1960s, seed trading flourished rapidly in Hong Kong,  our brand became well known at the local market and served as the market leader on high quality flower seeds. Meanwhile, the company also began to establish relationships with the major international seed breeding companies in Japan, the US and Europe. 

In 1967, Andrew Tse sent his son, Anthony Tse, to the University of California at Davis to study Horticulture. Anthony Tse returned in 1975 with a doctorate in Plant Physiology and joined the company. He continued to develop the seed business, in addition to the trading business on importing and exporting, contract production of hybrid seeds in China was started in mid-1980s for foreign companies. We also started to develop our own products.The Seed Production Department was established in 1986 to provide contract production of vegetable and flower seeds for overseas companies in China.

 

The Clover Laboratory was launched in 2007. It is an internal lab that mainly focuses on marker development and plant pathology. Using DNA markers allow us to accelerate all aspects of the breeding program. It makes selection for specific traits faster, as well as on rapid quality control of F1 hybrid. In addition, we have a wide range of pathogen stock, that we can use for pathogen identification and phenotypic screening.