#13 CONVERSATIONS* part four (revised 6/10) "is it all over for them?"

Is it all over for them?




Sarah

Can independent garden stores succeed in America or is it all over for them?



Nick got up from the little yellow table and moved to the coffee pot. He did not drink much coffee these days, but the questions she was starting to ask demanded a fresh cup. He seemed to think deeper after a shot of good black coffee. He could sip a little on it and ponder the answer for a while. He sat down again, putting his hand on the brown notebook, moving it closer to him


Nick

You know, ten years or even five years ago, there was no doubt in my mind that it was finished for the little guy and his garden shop. The families running these places better look hard at selling the land and getting out fast. What I am seeing now is a change which might, just might give them some real hope for a good business that could go on for years ahead. Let me tell you about what I think is happening and some of my reasons why life could be good for them again.

The first big change is the big superstores and their love affair with gardening. The marriage seems to be on the rocks. I think some big shot behind the shiny corporate desk in New York City has been looking at the numbers and she is not happy. The garden shops of Home Depot and Lowe’s are looking pretty bleak these days. When they were high balling in the eighties and nineties, those places were crisp and exciting and full of great plants and products. The employees had a fair amount of knowledge of gardening, the prices were shamefully low and the parking lots were full.

But they took their eyes off the ball. Now those stores are shop worn and tattered at the edges. The employees often are one or two kids with rings in their noses and an old man who have been pushed into that department as some sort of punishment. The lumber stacks that are always near the garden area are moving closer and closer squeezing into the plant displays and the change over to all lumber stacks in that area in the off season gets shorter each year.

The gardeners have been slowly watching these big boy places go to pieces each season when they pull up to the entrance. Yeah, they will always make the rounds to these stores, but their excitement is gone for filling the car with big boy stuff. No, I think the love is gone for the bigs and gardening. The turn of dollars for each square foot is king and gardening is not cutting it any longer. I don’t see it coming back for them.

Another reason is that this whole “shop and buy local” thing is sweeping the country. If you put that together with all the hype for gardeners and homeowners to “go natural” for the environment, an independent garden shop, always there sitting in those towns , could be a nice welcome mat for these shoppers. The owners of these stores are going to need answers on how to “go green”, what works and was doesn’t work. Gardeners, sure as hell, are not going to get them from the kid with the ring in his nose!

Gardeners and homeowners are getting a little suspicious about the trees and shrubs shipped into their towns from thousands of miles away. They are thinking about locally grown a lot these days.

Nick squeezed on the notebook as he talked


I don’t believe that the independent garden stores can operate like they used to in the old days. It will take a lot of thinking and planning for a garden store to make it.

I do believe that they can have a going business again that can be a pleasure to work and a lot of coin can be made.

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"Return to the Clan"

"I have been worrying these days about how my little garden store can survive these terrible economic times in America. We all pulled together some years back and weathered the storm of the big stores all around us almost giving plants away. But now this collapse is probably going to be much tougher.

But then, I am also wondering if this awful recession could be a new beginning for my store instead of hanging out a 'going out of business' sign. Are we crossing into a new era of a 'return to the clan' for the American consumer?

This might be the turning point where 'community' is the central theme; when people who live and work together support each other like no other time in recent history.

Perhaps they have grown tired of or simply cannot afford to accept products that fail with no solutions from the faceless and nameless. Maybe people are finally frustrated with unanswered questions and hours on the telephone seeking relief from far away places.

Will they return when they can to their communities for the comfort of knowing that 'locally purchased, locally fixed' is a wise investment?

There is no better pathway to success for the gardener than the little plant place in their communities. We know plants and plant care. We can help them be successful. We are, as Malcolm Gladwell points to in his book 'The Outliers'. We have the 10,000 hours of practice of plant care that separates the average from the experts in our field.

We have beat this drum of 'expert knowledge' and 'proven plants' for many seasons and it really has not stopped the long lines from forming at the big corporate garden departments.

Could this economic tragedy in America move those gardeners back to a community place where they feel safe and secure about their choices?"

Time will tell.

Sharon Hasbro

Garden Store Owner

New Mexico

#12 COMMENTS* (revised 6/10) " the cardboard sign"

Nick Hudson remembers the old days when all the family got out there each spring to sell trees and shrubs. The handshake was the contract. The cash register was the pocket.

It was a sunny warm July day on a busy street in Spokane, Washington. Two empty wooden apple boxes rested on the sidewalk. The words were scrawled on a piece of cardboard nailed to the boxes;

CLOSED
everything is gone
open next year
thanks



Frank Denardo and his family had been on this street corner for forty years. Frank opened the place as a fruit stand in the late forties. His son, Frank, Jr. who grew up in the business had the place now. Now, Jr's sons, Louie and Donovan and their kids help with the spring planting craziness.

Frank Sr. would come down each May morning, sit in his chair, bang his cane on the floor and bellow out to his grand kids that the plants were dry or the weeds needed pulling. That's about all the old man could do anymore.

The fruit stand had not changed much. On frosty March mornings, when the Denardos were unloading the trucks, the oil barrel stove popped and whistled with hand split chunks of dry tamarack wood. When the heat of July came, they would roll up all the big garage doors. Now that they quit selling fresh fruit, that didn't matter anymore. the place was locked up before the hot months.

Old Frank and Jr. got into this big fight over the fruit a couple of years ago, throwing old crates at each other. “God damned it boy, you are going to ruin this place", the old man would shout. The kid finally convinced his Dad that selling fruit was just “trading dollars”. It was too much work to come home with nothing but a lot of aching bones.

Old Frank knew it but he just couldn't stand the thought of not selling boxes of fresh cots and peaches from the orchards of the Yakima valley. He had made a lot of friends over the years in those places. He belonged there, sampling the cherries as they came off the trees, taking a little “nip” now and then with the farmers as they walked the rows.

There was a new generation in Spokane. Nobody canned anymore. Old Frank raised his kids on those tree ripened Bartlett Pears. A few grey haired ladies buying a couple of Gravenstein Apples would not get his boys and the grand kids through the cold Spokane winters.


Jr. saw that the money was in shrubs and trees and flowers. When his sons unlocked the gate for the first time in March, Moms and their kids would swarmed the place gathering up all the blooming primroses and pansies leaving the wooden racks bare.

Young Frank set a little table up in the old fruit cooler with a bunch of cut butcher paper and some crayons. He got Donovan’s little girls to draw the letters and the prices. “Pansies 69 cents” and pin them near the flats of flowers.

Oh yeah, Young Frank knew what they wanted. When he would load up at the greenhouses at dawn, he would piss the growers off by demanding “everything in color”. Color is what emptied his racks every day. Color is what his customers wanted.

Frank Jr. and his two uncles drove the trucks each spring. The three of them would sit around the kitchen table as the sun dropped low over the shrub farmer's fields in Oregon. They would tear off chunks of Italian Ciabatta bread and throw hundred dollar bills until the farmer finished dressing his piece with warm garlic butter. He took a bite, look up at the pile and grunt “that’s enough”. The field of three thousand evergreens was theirs to dig, load and drive them home.

Sometimes the farmer would bring out the book, the printed price list for his evergreens. Jr. would say “if you bring out the book, I’m outta here”. Frank Jr. liked the way his old man did it with hundred dollar bills over the laughter of the Italian farmer and his family and the sweet aroma of fresh pasta and sauce. Jr. stayed until the last evergreen was packed neatly in the trucks.

The uncles drove the four hundred miles to Spokane, unloaded and turned the truck around for Oregon again, “watchin the white lines” mile after mile until it the season ended. There were no displays or signs. They just opened the doors and sold them right out of the truck until the last evergreen was gone.

Each season, it ended and fast as it began. The flowers were tucked into the customer's flower boxes; the shrubs were planted in their beds. The last car drove out of their gate. Old Frank and Jr. turned off the lights, locked the door and pinned the cardboard sign to the apple boxes.

CLOSED
everything is gone
open next year
thanks

#11 CONVERSATIONS*/ part three (revised 6/10 ) "dumbing down"

Dumbing Down

Sarah

Where did all the gardeners get their plants after those little garden stores vanished?

Nick:

Since many of the old guard garden store owners have vanished or died, it has been tough for gardeners to find quality and variety of plants in America. I mean not just the “gardening snobs” who want exotic varieties. It was the homeowner, who for twenty- five years, planted lemon drop marigolds in the same place along her front sidewalk. It was the guy who filled his planter boxes with double ruffled California Giants Petunias because the perfume of that variety moved through his house on warm nights.

It began to fall apart when the big superstores stores started “dumbing down” the choices. The big guys told the growers what selection they would sell and that was not much. Gone were the large flowered cutting geraniums, replaced by the cheesy “seed” geraniums. Gone were the huge flowering petunias and replaced by dinky flowers, with only one or two colors, even at that. Forget about the massive displays of garden seeds. A rose bush selection? Nada. You had your choice of two colors of some stupid “easy maintenance” rose bush that had as much character as a box of rocks.

Gardeners who were accustomed to a favorite color or variety had to put up with all of this and fit the choices they were offered. What was staring the gardener in the face were hundreds of flats of nothing. Buy what they had or don’t plant. So the growers threw out the plants they had always grown to please the big boys and lemon drop marigolds were kicked to the ground. It was a viscous cycle. The big stores dumbed down the selections. The gardeners were forced to dumb down and the new gardeners and homeowners did not know any better than to be dumbed down.

It just wasn’t just the puny selection of plants; they were just plain crappy plants. The big stores were always hammering on the growers to lower their prices, so the growers would pull the plants off the growing benches too fast offering plants with no roots and a lot of dirt in the pots.

The selling of plants and plant care products, like so many other products has all come to "Gresham's Law"; the bad drives out the good.

A good quality plant may take "bench time" of six weeks to be reliable to grow and thrive in the garden. But growers became squeezed by the big boys to cut the price. So they pulled those plants off the bench quicker.

Very soon, the plants with only three weeks on the bench, those weak rooted, horrible little things became the standard. A sturdy plant will a full six weeks bench time and the cost that goes with that time were simply ignored by the gardener as "too expensive", even though the weak ones may have to be purchased and planted twice to get the same results!

Some gardeners started working the internet for plants. But, as was the case with the old time country cousin of the Internet, the mail order catalogue, what you saw on that screen was disappointing when it hit your doorstep. The pictures looked great but the little box contained dried out things not worth putting a trowel into the ground. And it was pretty hard to shove a bit maple tree into a mail box!

Some gardeners ventured to the back yard hobby growers and there were garden clubs that swapped plants. Maybe, a trade show would be near the gardeners and they could find a few plants for sale in the displays after the show was over.

All that was left was to drive miles and miles to a garden center that was still standing, or hope that luck would come your way at a local farmers market where some rogue hippie was keeping those varieties alive.

The whole thing was discouraging after the little garden store was bulldozed for a Taco Bell.

#10 COMMENTS* (revised 6/10) "the big boys were not all bad"

The big boys were not all bad



“What the K-marts, the Home Depots, and the Wal-marts did for the small independent garden stores was not all bad. They still are all lowlife scoundrels!

When they jumped in during the late seventy’s, gardening was starting to boom. Lots of homeowners got their first taste of gardening because of the big ads and the glitz of these store presentations.

For the small garden store owners, life got better for a while because of them. Gone were the days when the owner had to jump in a truck every couple of days, drive to a greenhouse and hand pick all the plants for his store. The big boys insisted that the plants be delivered to them.

The big boys made the growers bring their plants on portable racks for easy movement. Heck, before the big stores, We, often, had to drive to the guy's greenhouse, gather, move, and bring the stuff back. A van full of eighty flats of plants took six hours. After the greenhouses and growers were forced to modernize, buy trucks and moving racks, Thanks to the big boys, It now takes 20 minutes to get those eighty flats!

They would not accept plants that were not color tagged with information. Before these changes, you sometimes were lucky to get one hand written plant tag in each flat. These stores also required that the pots, paks and flats be bar coded for quick checkout.

And no more just shoving trees and shrubs into any old rusty can. All the pots had to be good looking for their customers. And another thing, since these big store employees knew jack nothing about the garden bug sprays, they forced the manufacturers to produce “ready to use” stuff that any idiot could sell.

The big stores were bright and clean and well stocked and that cleaned up the little garden stores that had to compete. These standards raised the bar for all garden stores in the United States. I don't know. If I had my choice of a Home Depot or a rusty can, you know what I would pick!"

Mel Anthony
Bismarck, North Dakota




The cold frames


“The weathered white panel van rumbled along the twenty miles of highway each day toward the cold frames.

They loomed in front of me, as the mist lifted high into the hills above, wooden coffins casing morning shadows across the valley floor. They were ninety-eight in two rows, one hundred feet long, ten feet wide and three feet deep, with a gravel road between the two blocks of frames.

Tiny figures in the distance were lifting off the battered wooden tops, letting the morning sun warm the plants beneath. When they finished opening the frames, after the lunch bell, they started all over again, putting the tops back on before the night frost settled on the tiny seedlings. It was all day every day until all the plants were gone from the frames.

Inside the frames were rusted warm pipes that snaked back to an old boiler in the shed nearby. Resting above the pipes, kept warm and ready, were twelve million flowers ready to complete the gardeners journey for their perfect colored spring palette.

Each morning, I would park the old dented van on the road exactly half way into the blocks of frames. Opening the back rear doors wide, I dropped all the worn plywood pieces and two-by four supports to the gravel and built the first platform deep in the van for the plants. With all the boards and supports in place, the old girl would hold eighty flats of flowers. It was silent out there with the stillness broken only with the crack of the cold frame tops slapping down against rocks and gravel.

I walked down the frames looking for special plants for my garden store. They were nested in neat rows in the frames. I swung my leg over the frame wall and lifted my other leg over. I grabbed two flats of flowers with each hand, hopped back over the frame wall and carried the plants back down the cold frame row to the road way.

Two by two, I gathered the flats walking each time back and forth along the length of the hundred foot frames until I had the eighty flats for the van. With all the flowers lining the roadway, I drove along the gravel, picking each flat up again, sliding the plants onto my shelves of plywood and two by fours. Five hours will have passed looking, lifting, carrying and loading.

As the afternoon faded, the van moved out of the valley, away for the frames and onto the highway, returning again and again each morning for my gardeners.”