ROADTOSUCCESS
Garden centre evolution BY ROD McDONALD
TO SOME, a garden centre is a retail operation that has been with us forever and a day. Not true. Greenhouses and nurseries have existed for hundreds of years, but retail garden centres have their origins in the ‘60s and began to appear, in a noticeable fashion, in the late ‘70s. When I was kid, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, growing up in Regina, Sask., my mother bought her seeds at the local, independent grocer. That was the norm. Others got their seeds from mail order catalogues. THE BACKYARD “GARDEN CENTRE” When we wanted bedding plants, we went to the local greenhouse, of which there were many choices. In those days there was often a small greenhouse set up in the backyard of a gardening enthusiast in the neighbourhood. Those greenhouses were usually hand-built and jerry rigged to operate with hoses running from the house and
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an old furnace for heat. They grew mainly vegetable transplants and the basic flowers like geraniums, marigolds and dusty miller. The varieties were predictable. They did not, as a rule, sell trees, shrubs or roses. If you wanted trees, shrubs or roses, you had to visit a nursery, usually out of town. At the nursery, nothing was potted. Everything, including perennials, was sold bare root. If you did not live close enough to a nursery, you ordered your bare root plant material from a catalogue and waited for it to arrive by mail, train or bus. Finding hard goods such fertilizers or pots was not easy. The local hardware store would stock a few hard goods, but stock was generally limited to the spring months. Our local 700 sq. ft. hardware store, for example, sold peat moss. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, that small store could move 800 bales of peat moss. It was an incredible amount.
JUNE 1ST? GONE FISHING! When you visited your local greenhouse, if you asked the owner, he might sell you a sandwich bag filled with the fertilizer he used in his growing operations. Rarely did the greenhouses sell gardening supplies. They saw it, as their job, to sell plants in the month of May and to be closed by June 1st. It was rare for a greenhouse to be open in the month of June, and if it was, what was left was overgrown and of poor quality. There were no box stores at the time, only department stores and they were only involved in our trade on the periphery. The concept of a one-stop retail operation, where you could purchase your bedding plants, trees and shrubs plus associated hard goods and care products, started out slowly. At first, it was often something as simple as a shed or lean-to attached to an existing greenhouse or nursery. Eventually, retail garden centres started opening up as free-standing operations that brought in their bedding plants and nursery stock from others. These stand-alone operations were not looked upon favourably by many of the growers in our trade. Some dismissed it as a terrible idea. I often tell the story of a conversation I had around 1977. I was visiting an established nursery and I told one of the owners that my dream was to open a retail garden centre. He scoffed at my idea, explaining the public would never purchase plants from a business that was not a grower. I also said my dream was to have a year-round operation. Again, he dismissed my dream, explaining that “no one, absolutely no one, will buy plants after June 15.” Earlier this year, I was part of a Zoom meeting of retail garden centre operators from across Canada. We assembled under the auspice of The CNLA Anniversary Project. It was a great experience to be with men and women who have spent 40-50 years in this trade of
