Two tales that tell the same story
Have you noticed the colored nursery pots as you walk through your favorite nursery? They range for white, green, blue, purple. And then the old standard black pot. Some of you may seek out the colored pots for your own reasons. I honestly don’t see a colored pot when helping you find a plant. I’m looking for the best looking plant.
Colored pots are marketing. The plant business is now big business and the colored pots represent the investments the growers are making in researching new cultivars, traveling to all places around the world to find the next best plant, then to trial the plant, which can take many years before the plant finds its way into the nursery. This is costly and if the new cultivars or a new genus is discovered this is a market success, worth the investment. It doesn’t always work out and the investment in time and money is a dud. When a new plant is deemed ready for the big show - retail market, it most likely has a patent right (the development of a particular plant requires much investment and a patent protects the rights of the particular grower). The patent rights also allow only certain nurseries to grow the plant. Many times, this increases the price you pay for the plant until the patent is released. Once the patent time expires all nursery growers have the opportunity to propagate and sell to the retail market. This can bring the plant price down.
The finding and research of new plants is an old trade. When I first entered this business in the 70’s there was one colored pot, black, and were two Weigela in the trades (at least we had only two at the nursery). Now I can’t keep track of all the new ones and most are in colored pots. Hydrangeas breeding has taken it to another level. I could go on about plant breeding and colored pots but you get the message. It’s embarrassing when a gardener comes to the nursery knowing more about the newest plants. They have been reading the gardening magazines during the winter months and learned from articles or advertisements about the new and improved plants. Their questions are; do we have, will we have, what do you know about this plant, how big, what flower color… We are supposed to be the experts but we need to look up it up on the computer to give the answers, and that’s embarrassing.
Gardeners expect to find these new introductions/colored pots. Yesterday I helped unload a truck. A third of the plants were in colored pots. Included on this truck were persimmon in a colored pot - not native to Michigan but the colored pot tells the customer it’s a U.S. Native. I’m excited to have this plant in the nursery but it’s not in our native section even though it has a Native colored pot.
Mentioning this reminds me of what has happened with native plants. When I first started getting involved in native plants the only growers were those that actually went out and collected seeds, they germinated and put in plug trays. Their markets were a few native plant retail nurseries and mostly contractors or conservation districts repopulating disturbed areas. Because of my budding interest in native plants back then I visited these nurseries and realized their business model didn’t mesh with mine but their philosophy for the use of natives did. I didn’t sell plugs but I could grow on to a #1-gallon pot. So, our nursery became a grower of sorts, taking plugs and growing to retail ready. It was a shift in our business model but it seems to have worked.
Since making this leap the big wholesale nurseries and their connection to the native plant world has really changed. Now it’s big business and marketing has taken front stage. As mentioned earlier with the persimmon, big nurseries really want to get on board with the native scene, and it’s not local native it’s native to the U.S. Not realizing that a pot stating native to the U.S. is really meaningless. The U.S. is a very large country with many plant zones. To call a plant Native to the US is being irresponsible. It’s like tell gardener they can grow desert Cactus in Michigan because it’s a native plant to the U.S.
Are the big growers sending a crew out to collect local genome seeds? Most likely not, it’s too costly. So where does this leave the smaller growers doing the hard work of collecting open pollinated native seeds and growing. Well, if the laws of marketing tell me anything it will be a battle for them to stay ahead. Especially when so many cultivars of native are being introduced and labeled as native plants. This is marketing at its best, selling a native that really isn’t a native. You the public are being duped. Not at this nursery. We sell both but keep them separate and do our best to educate the differences.
