#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.