This is our story of green garden gates, the most successful group of 746 garden centers in the United States. Follow our adventure building our first store which starts at entry #1, A little Zen, some Zip Ties and a lot of Zinnias! We welcome your questions and comments by posting to this blog or by contacting nickhudson@earthlink.net
(copyright: nick hudson 2008)
The bright crimson red geranium flower matched perfectly with the shutters of her home.
And it was always 36 large plants, no more, no less.I would choose the best 36 and store them in my garage at home...........just for her.
Each May, each season, Emily Hanson would borrow her husband Nate’s work van. We would share laughter and tears as we loaded the van carefully; the birth of her new grand babies, her battle and victory over cancer, and their new winter retirement home in Arizona. We would wave goodbye for another year as she drove out the gates with the Tangos and all the other flowers she would need for her spring planting.
On this day, Emily said proudly, “John, this is Melinda, my granddaughter. She is the third generation of Hansons' who is shopping at your garden center.”
I took the Tangos to the van and opened the doors.
The entire floor was packed with all the flowers she was going to need for spring.
She looked at me and with embarrassment said,
“John, I just needed the Tangos. I bought the rest of my flowers at Home Depot........They did not have the Tangos.”
I knew at that moment that there was no future for my little garden store.
It rode with me at the bottom of a packed box resting in the back of a u haul trailer as I weaved in and out of the Chicago traffic to adventures unknown.
“Perhaps it would be the New Mexico high desert….
New Mexico. The enchanted lady of faded khaki
wrapped with olive and lavender, in stillness, Under a powder blue bonnet,
Warmed by the clear southwestern sun. Her moods change, as I traveled the winding ribbon.
North to Shiprock darting back and forth,
I moved in and out of the cool shadows of canyons,
Formations rising and falling from the basin floor.
I passed Navajo towns of mud and shanty and weather creased faces.
Beyond the white man's gas and oil rigs,
With racks of pipes waiting to be connected for just one more fill-up.
At last, over the great Rio Grande Gorge cutting deep into the soil,
It was New Mexico, the refuge for all of the bright eyes
Who gave up long ago trying to fit.
It could be Wisconsin….
Where the bite of the north winds is cocooned in laughter, and bratwurst and beer. Where life begins and ends with the cheese heads near the goal post of a Packers game. It could be these gardeners that I serve, with twisted nouns and round bodies and red rose cheeks and seed company baseball caps eager for another color to replace the brown and grey of a Midwest winter
It was to be New England.
Down the narrow roads between rock walls and under blooming overhangs of dogwood and azalea. With towns of tidy white clapboard nestled in the green of fern and wisteria. Where nurserymen tend their plants near the Capes of Cod and islands of Nantucket and the Vineyard. It is a lifetime from my native place to those strange New England voices. It is March and I prepare for the adventure”.
Later, it rested opened on me as I sipped fresh squeezed orange juice and watched the sun rise over a Mexico vacation morning and drifted off to sleep. Now, here in my one bedroom shack at the bottom of the searing Texas land, It sat unnoticed on a dusty shelf somewhere between dreams fulfilled and dreams forgotten.
Soon after this quiet rapping of my screen door, I remembered it. I would open the worn brown notebook and move my fingers to those scribbled pages of words and drawings.
She was tall. She was young. Her eyes glistened. Her hot copper red hair spun down her long neck to her shoulders. She was adorned with the confidence of light, of forward reach, of a spirit that moves from the alpha to the omega.
“Mr. Hudson?”, she said quietly and politely, is your name Nick Hudson? I am Sarah Banks, and I have come a long way to find you. It's about a crazy idea that I cannot get out of my head. Can you take some time this morning to help me to put this thing to rest once and for all?”
In those years with Harley-Davidson, Sarah would move her belongings state to state, province to province, settling for months in a strange, unfamiliar town to work that territory.
The pattern became routine. She found home repair items at a Home Depot and appliances at Sears. She spotted the nearest Jiffy Lube to get her car serviced and a Nordstroms close by for clothing. She got her double latte at a Starbucks each morning and perused the aisles of Barnes and Noble for the bestsellers.
The pattern was simple except for this little longing in her life: her need for gardening. Just a pot on the deck railing would do.
There were times when Sarah was delighted and surprised at the garden store she discovered in those towns.. Sometimes, there were the big “destination” garden centers. Sadly, however, the owners had strayed from the love of plants to the love of business. They had pushed the lawn food to the back and stuck patio furniture and barbecues up front. They shoved out the fertilizers for candle displays.
Gardeners walking through the doors weaved passed silverware and wine decanters, around the dish and place settings, over the outdoor rugs to a tiny display of bug sprays stuffed into a back corner. Impeccable color coordinated coiffed “sales associates” were ready to match the love seat cushions to your “outdoor space” but they stood blank unable to explain the difference between an aphid and an apricot.
Soon, these big garden centers looked like thousands of other “home” stores. For a time, it worked. Sales increased and new shoppers filled the parking lots. For a few, this change continues to be very successful. But in time, many lost the gardener.
These “leisure stores” put themselves in direct hard nose competition with the big boxes, the “category killers” and regional businesses who could offer better service and better pricing. It was not long when the “outdoor leisure” customers caught on to this and the parking lot started to empty.
Once in a great while, there was a real and honest garden store where the owners had committed their careers to plants and plant care.
Mostly, though it was the same….
There was always the question, the hunt and the disappointment. “Do you have a gardening store in town?” She watch the blank look come over the face of the clerk. “Oh yes we do, there is a Home Depot down about ten blocks”.
Sarah had found the Home Depot garden departments many times before in these towns and it was usually a mess, loaded with the sameness of plants screaming to be watered. “
No, she would say, I mean a local garden store?”. There would be silence, then the scurrying for information from the other clerks. “Well, I think there is one but I have never been there.”
Sarah would drive to it, the crumpled paper with the clerk’s directions by her side. The place would end up in a sad part of town on a secondary lot behind other old stores. A hand painted chipped portable reader sign with broken, missing letters announcing the arrival. An open gate hanging precariously from the hinges and a huge logging chain and padlock dangling from the rusted support pipe.
The surrounding wire fencing was bent down and torn from years of wear, with tall weeds weaving in and out. The parking lot was a mix of patched asphalt, gravel, grass and dirt. The neon open sign flickered inside the building facing the entrance with the letter “E” dark and broken.
Sarah turned in and stopped between the faint parking lines that had been sprayed painted on the dirt some years back. Two large dogs greeted her, licking and barking at her heels. Her leather shoes sank into wet mud from a small sprinkler that was overshooting the plants and pooling into the parking lot. It was a spring May morning and there were three other cars in the lot.
The door to the garden store was wooden, scarred and blackened. A faded half torn Master Charge sign stuck on the window. The hours were written on cardboard and taped to the door. “open 8-4, closed Sundays” with the words added in small letters “closed if the weather is bad” and warned, “cash only”
Sarah stepped inside and was hit by the strong suffocating odor of chemicals. There were wooden shelves with dusty bottles of insecticides. The ceiling was covered with dozens of shop worn wind chimes. A display of plastic pink flamingos stood in the corner surrounding a concrete fountain that was dry with a pump that was gurgling in agony.
Another corner had a bunch of faded artificial flowers and a wooden box holding candles with the peeling cellophane wrappers melded into the wax. An old fan moved back and forth from the counter. The register was brown from the dust. A hand scrawled sign said “in the back.”
The store was empty. A storm door with a broken glass that was duct taped led to a greenhouse lean-to pushed against the garden shop building. Sarah opened the storm door and walked up worn wooden planks to a higher level of the lean-to. A wheelbarrow that had been converted to a carrying cart stood in her path tipped sideways with a flat tire. In the distance she heard the scratchy sounds of a portable radio and someone watering.
There were rows of overgrown plants on benches with signs that offered a special price when purchased by the flat. The walkways between the benches of flowers were rough and bumpy from left over concrete that had been hand poured hurriedly troweled over years. There was fly paper and dead flies hanging on to the sticky suspended from wires above her.
She continued through the greenhouse lean-to to the back of the property. There was a stack of rain soaked, faded cardboard boxes piled high against an outside wall. Several rows of shrubs for sale were sitting on black plastic to keep the weeds down. The plastic sheets had become loose at the corners and were flapping in the wind, with grass that had found its way though the holes sheets, now higher than the shrubs.
A leaky garden hose shot spray into the air preventing Sarah from going down the row of shrubs. There was a collection of concrete fountains and statuary in the distance that had been left out in the winter with the bowls cracked and concrete sloughing off. Near the end of the shrubs was a cluster of rose bushes for sale that were growing in cardboard boxes. Sarah spotted one that she wanted and reached down to pick it up only to find that the roots had anchored hard into ground below. She pushed her fingers under the box, interlaced her hands and pulled hard to release the box from the soil below. The sign said “half price.” The cardboard box fell apart.
There was a tree selection. They were in plastic black cans and rusty metal egg containers tied to a chain link fence. A sign secured to the fence with bailing twine read, “We sell Monrovia quality plants”. There was a coffee can on the ground overflowing with brown water and tan cigarette butts.
Bill and AnnNorton owned and operated the place.
Bill’s dad and mom started it in the 50’s. Bill went off to college for a career in engineering, but when his dad got sick, he had to quit school and come home to run it. He married Ann the next year and she took the chair for the next twenty years transplanting seedlings into pots, kinda like making big rocks out of little rocks.
Bill hated the garden store and his life he was forced take. He barked back at the customers and their questions. Ann was silent, a lit Marlboro 100 dangling from her lips. She quietly moved the dirt around the newly planted seedlings.
Sarah quickly gathered some of few remaining flowers that were not overgrown or starving for water, paid a little boy who had stepped in front of the cash register, started her car and drove back out through the rickety gates and onto the street.
This garden store industry was confusing for Sarah. She had questions. She needed answers. She had an idea rattling in her head.
Maybe this early morning flight to the Texas gulf coast and a quiet knock on his screen door will give her some answers.
“For him, it was the starting gun. The truck brakes released. The sudden push of air cracked open the morning chill.He grasped the worn steel handle, lifted it up and back and pulled it toward his body. The long high door to the trailer slowly opened riding along its creaking hinges. The rush of moist hot hit his wind weathered face.
It had been loaded and sealed six hundred miles and fourteen hours ago with the freshly dug and gathered trees and evergreens from the fertile valleys of Pennsylvania. Nick reached up and nested his fingers into the steel grooves of the trailer bed and pulled his body up to sit flat on the cold hard floor next to the bundles.
He stepped over the dark burlap and mud balls of glistened evergreens woven flat and stacked high inside this dark box. It was his ritual each year; to make his way over and higher to center of the trailer, to stand alone and to inhale that first breath.
Suddenly, the cold of the northern winter was gone. It was the wet freshly dug Pennsylvania mud, laced with the sweet aroma of evergreens.
Spring had come to Nick Hudson.”
Nick had devoted his entire working career to owning and operating garden stores and helping other owners with their places. He stumbled into the business by accident in the early 1970’s when looking for a small grocery store to buy. His early wanderlust had taken him to the tall timber of Montana, to the red clay of Georgia, to his bearded hippie days into the air of San Francisco tambourines and bong pipes.
The realtor ask Nick and his young wife; “do you know anything aboutgardening?” Nick knew nothing and could care even less about it. Sally, his wife, had gardened a little. He showed them a small grocery store/fruit stand for sale in town that also sold plants and garden supplies in the springtime. It was tiny and rundown but to Nick and Sally, the dream of possibilities stood before them.
He and Sally bought the tiny store in late summer. They nearly starved to death later that winter eating from the boxes and cans of food on the shelves. The first day and the first customer suspiciously looked up at Nick and said “I hope you are not one ofthose people who buys a store and knows nothing about it.”
From those early years when he and Sally slapped together old boards to make displays and moved little sprinklers around the plants, they built that little store, over the next twenty five years , into a large regional garden center, nursery and florist shop servicing a 100 mile radius.They continued to expand into “portable seasonal garden shops” in two states.. In the late 90’s They built a new garden center complex to service the expanding market. In early 2000,
Nick and Sally fell on hard times and overreached dreams. The creditors seized their lifetime of hard earned savings. Nick traveled throughout the United States for the next five years working at other garden centers. After living out of apartments and cardboard boxes, he gave up the struggle and rented a weathered one bedroom shack on the Texas gulf coast to be near his youngest son.
In the winter, he would camp out in his "Luxury Retirement Condo" on the beach in a little Mexican town facing the blue Caribbean. Sally had left him many years before and moved back to her parent’s dairy farm in Wisconsin.
Nick Hudson knew mostly all there is to know about the retail garden center industry. More importantly, Nick loved plants and plant care.
His face of sixty years was furrowed now from decades of springtimes gazing into the frigid dawn morning light, standing and staring, guarding the tender plants from the scourge of frost and the loss of everything in their struggle for financial survival.
He walked slightly bent now from packing hundred pound sacks of seed potatoes back and forth from the cooling shed into the hot early summer heat.
Oh yes, he knew mostly all about this life with plants and gardeners
Sarah Lindsey-Banks was raised in the tiny farming town of Nyssa, Oregon. After her education at the University of Portland, she accepted an internship at the Cleveland Art Institute.
Several years later, she received a call from the Harley-Davidson Company and an offer to lead the re-designing of their company stores and product introductions throughout the United States and Canada.
Sarah lived in twenty American and Canadian cities and towns during the next ten years, moving Harley-Davidson to the forefront of modern retailing and presentation to their customers.
Exhausted from the stress of the corporate cadence, Sarah returned to Oregon, married her high school sweetheart, John Banks, now a tax and investment attorney, and settled in an old bungalow in the trendy Pearl district of Portland.
You see, Sarah was not about being a corporate upstart scratching her way to the corner office. Sarah was above all, an artist and a gardener. As a child she helped her grandmother each morning cut off unwanted branches in the little Oregon family orchard. She packed the Mason jars with fresh tomatoes for canning as she watched the pressure cooker rumble over the gas jets of the stove top. Little Sarah picked the seeds for the springtime flowers from the wooden racks of the little town garden store.
In those career days of the screeching clamor of corporate demands, she would create and she would garden to find quiet peace near the soil of a spring morning. I had seen that face and those eyes many times in the warm days of May.
Gardening was their time and their peace. Sarah Lindsey-Banks is one of them………
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Nick Hudson, or his associate, is available for presentations, orally or verbally to the industry. Mr. Hudson, or his associate, is also available for consultations to garden centers, both onsite and offsite. If you have an interest in a presentation or a consultation, please contactnickhudson@earthlink.net.
This is the story of the journey of four people who reached out and closed their grasp on a fleeting momentary thought. We molded and shaped this thought into building the most successful multi-store company in the history of the retail garden center industry.
This is the story of how we did it.
We begin with us. If you want to go right to the nuts and bolts of building the stores, start at archive entry year 2009 post #57
We are four from different backgrounds, ages experiences and outlooks. We relied on our experiences. We begged, borrowed and stole from our competitors. We listened to the industry and our employees. We come together with a common thread and admiration for this profession.
That success in blending of all these ideas makes green garden gates the envy of the American horticultural community.
My name is Nick Hudson, one of the four. It will be my pleasure to tell our story, listen to you, and offer any advice. I write this story to help you stay on a bright path in this career we love so much. There will be laughs along the way, a few moments of sadness and plenty of personal reflections. So, sit back and come with me on this dusty road of our twists and turns.
We will start at the beginning. We hope you will understand why green garden gates succeeds when so many others have failed. For some, our story is familiar. You have been down this road. For the new young garden store owners just entering this great life, We give you tips on the lessons we have learned and we put up the danger signs along the road so that you can avoid them.
Please ask questions, challenge us, and offer your view on our direction.
TELL US YOUR STORY.
Tell us about the stupid mind numbing bonehead choices you made.
Tell us what works for your store, how you operate, what you buy, in the day to day trenches.
Tell us what ideas caused you to fail
Make up a fake name and city if you want when you comment, whatever works. We will all learn in this community of garden center owners and employees. We will better our stores and enrich our working lives.
We write it in the style of two vintage books and an old film;
"The Volkswagen Guide For The Complete Idiot", is an old hippie book on how to repair your bug when you don't have any money, "The Whole Earth Catalogue", a survival source book for finding and knowing all kinds of things useful,
The film, "Alone in the Wilderness", about Dick Proenneke surviving the wilds of Alaska.
We are grateful for the ideas of;
Les Schwab, the tire king, in his book, Pride In Performance, The Mom and Pop Store by Robert Spector The Nordstrom Way by Robert Spector and Patrick McCarthy Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
I knew when it was over..........
