Since then, Harris's 50 acres, 4 farmed, have expanded to 300, more than 100 of which bear some 1,000 different flowers and shrubs. Although total sales in the mail-order nursery business have flattened out in the past few years, and more companies have entered the market, sales at White Flower have risen 10% to 15% a year. The staff has increased from 12 employees and 20 seasonal workers to 83 full-timers and 60 seasonal workers. And Wadsworth recently purchased an old manufacturing building in nearby Torrington, Conn., which will provide 100,000 square feet for new offices for the sales, customer service, and finance departments, currently bursting out of their quarters in converted farm buildings and stables.
Wadsworth claims to be pleased with the growth he's so carefully nurtured. Yet he is also concerned: "I worry we'll be seen as a go-go operation," he says, "a rocket ship willing to sacrifice quality to growth. And that's just not true. Our corporate strategy is simple: we will be the quality supplier. Period." That means being a nursery first and foremost, and a mail-order business second.
A few words about pink lavender back up this contention. Not too long ago, this new shade, offering a dramatic contrast to lavender's traditional smoky blue, was the talk among nursery owners. White Flower quickly planted some in its test gardens, and lovely pink blossoms resulted. Everybody was excited, and plans were made to pair the pink and the blue and photograph them for the up-coming catalog. About then, Landon Winchester, White Flower's staff horticulturist, happened by, cut a piece off a trial plant, and held it to his nose. "We can't sell this," he said. The smell was only slightly bitter, but the point was, it was not the expected aroma of lavender. You can buy pink lavender from other mail-order nurseries, but not from White Flower Farm.
"Eliot has a very clear idea of what White Flower Farm is, and his standards come through consistently," says Lesley Nelmes, White Flower vice-president and general manager. "He loves beautiful things and respects them. I don't think anyone here is confused about what we do." Pointing to a recently cleared meadow and on to newly planted azaleas and rhododendrons, all of this far from the view of most visitors to the retail store and street-side gardens, she adds: "He wants us to be what we say we are."
The message is clear to White Flower's new production manager, Greg Jones, who was hired away from Gurney Seed & Nursery Inc., a catalog nursery easily three times White Flower's size.He left Gurney "partly because after a while, the plants become like nuts and bolts. At most places," he says, "nurserymen deal only with small plants or cuttings and roots. They really don't see the finished product. At Gurney, there was a guy who could identify many varieties of trees by their roots, but show him a leaf and he was lost."
Wadsworth himself likes to quote what he considers a great advertisement for a small brewery: "We drink all we can. The rest we sell." "That's the way we feel about the plants," he says. "The gardens here are allegedly for the benefit of our customers, but the fact is, they are for us. We are in it for the love of plants, not just to sell them." But sell they must, and at what appears on the surface to be a disadvantage. Specialty growers, limiting themselves to a few or a single species of flower, can almost without exception grow their product more cheaply than White Flower. Thus, many varieties, wholesaled to other mail-order catalogs, are sold at prices The Garden Book cannot match. White Flower has never even tried to compete on price.
There are other problems as well. This year, there are shortages at White Flower Farm. Wadsworth avoids the temptation to buy replacements at wholesale, for to do so would be to lower the guard on quality control, an essential ingredient if customers are to return to White Flower year after year. Wadsworth is similarly unyielding with perishable surpluses. When White Flower fails to sell what it grows, he doesn't try to wholesale the extra plants elsewhere. Nor does he hold fire sales or try to finetune demand with last-minute advertising. He buries his mistakes -- literally. "We've tried a lot of things and essentially discovered it's throwing good money after bad. We've found it's best simply not to be too aggressive, not overcommit ourselves, not try to sell out every year to maximize the last dollar, because all we're going to do is offend the last 25% of the people who order."
Despite the problems, Wadsworth still believes in the White Flower way. He estimates that as many as one-third of the 250,000 clients who are sent White Flower's biannual catalog place at least two orders a year. "I think in the end, what the others are going to lose by their strategies is a clear identification with their product and an identification with their customers," he says, in an apparent -- though unspecified -- reference to Wayside Gardens, owned by George W. Park Seed Co. and one of Wadsworth's most formidable catalog rivals. "When you become a shipping warehouse in South Carolina, in the scorching heat, with big semitrailers arriving from Ohio, it's pretty hard to identify with a little old lady sitting on her porch in Vermont wondering whether her peonies are going to make enough roots, or whether the full moon is going to mean a hard frost for her garden. We don't have any trouble empathizing with her -- because we are doing the same thing she is doing."
In essence, the people who work at White Flower Farm are expected to sell education and service as well as to grow the biggest and best flowers. The Garden Book, for example, is not just a catalog. It is a beautifully written book filled with helpful advice and information for both beginning and experienced gardeners. The three most trusted words in home gardening these days may well be The Garden Book's sign-off:
