Sincerely, Amos Pettingill
So graceful is the prose, so gentle the approach, so laid-back the sales pitch, that you practically forget you are a customer. Listen: "Tulips are the lipstick of the garden, adding a touch of color when and where it is most needed. They can be soft or bold, elegant or informal, but it's plain that if we didn't have tulips, someone would have to invent them. In our garden we make abundant use of a recent strain of tulips that can truly be said to be perennial. No, they will not last as long as peonies, but neither will we."
Wadsworth has made a lot of changes in his nine years at the helm of White Flower Farm, but there's one thing he didn't change. He kept Amos Pettingill in charge of prose and his gentlemanly mien the mode of doing business. People who come asking to see Amos Pettingill may or may not be disappointed.
"You're talking to him," Wadsworth says, should a visitor ask him to point out Pettingill. Wadsworth's predecessor, William Harris, created the persona. Wadsworth says he has just "shamelessly aped his style" and cooked up a signature to pen on letters. How does he envision this Pettingill fellow? "I see him as a 70-year-old uncle, somebody who has been gardening all his life, who has undertaken the job of helping you start your own garden. He looks like the face out in the hall," Wadsworth says, referring to a smiling, white-haired photograph of Harris.
"Actually," he continues, one foot up on his desk, "Amos Pettingill is not me. He's a distillation of the wisdom of everybody here. . . . We're just a bunch of Swamp Yankees trying to grow plants carefully and ship them carefully -- and we'll be tickled to death to do business with you." If that sounds a little bit like Amos Pettingill talking, it is hardly surprising, for Wadsworth admits it has become increasingly hard to determine where White Flower Farm stops and Eliot Wadsworth begins.
"I do believe companies have to have an internal consistency about what they do," says Wadsworth. "And for better or worse, that reflects the work habits and integrity of the boss." Walking to his car, the sight of a lone dandelion will have him stooped and grabbing. Wadsworth has the lawns mowed not once, but twice a week. "The place looks like a new penny 365 days a year," he says with pride. An unkempt nursery, of course, is a candidate for disease. "But I am also fussy, partly because it's a way of expressing your affection and respect for the people who work for you." He pays his people well. Managers earn top dollar and experienced tractor drivers make as much as $7.80 an hour, considerably more than at other nurseries.Wages, says Wadsworth, account for $1 of every $3 taken in. To be tight with salaries, Wadsworth knows, would be ruinous: he needs a dedicated, stable work force, because farming is so labor-intensive and, most of all, because his emphasis on tending plants and customers with equal diligence demands it.
"White Flower trains its people well," says an envious executive of a competing mail-order nursery. "When I've called to place orders, I've found the operators qualified to handle many horticultural questions. I love companies like that. They are really good for the whole industry." The telephone operators at White Flower Farm, who take about one-third of the orders, attend regularly scheduled briefing sessions led by staff horticulturist Winchester, so they can advise and inform customers. In slow times, operators are sometimes given assignments in shipping and in the fields. This is not only to ensure a full day's work for a full day's pay, but to expose them to what they are selling. "If you stand in a field of 35,000 phlox, you'll remember it for the rest of your life," says Wadsworth. "You may not remember all 22 of the colors or varieties we sell, but you will remember what they look like and smell like, and about when they were in bloom."
White Flower is such a customer-driven company that when Wadsworth talks about the probable impact of a big new computer on order processing, he speaks what others might consider a businessman's blasphemy: "the trick is to avoid the temptation to sell, sell, sell." Instead of programming the computer to prod telephone operators with slick, suggestive marketing aids, Wadsworth would rather it help solve gardening problems. "What would our director of horticulture, David Smith, say if he were on the phone?" He believes that perhaps before the end of this year the computer will be able, while processing an order, to flag potential problems: plants not hardy enough for a particular zip code; one sun-loving flower in an order of shade dwellers; a combination f colors that, if destined for the same location, might not blend well together.
Indeed, in the person of Landon Winchester, White Flower Farm functions almost as a clearinghouse for horticultural tips, pointers, and desperately sought advice. With close-cropped white hair, silver-framed glasses, and an unhurried, gentlemanly air about him, Winchester might pass for Amos Pettingill's younger brother. He came to White Flower about four years ago after a long career with the Brooklyn Botantical Garden and a stint as superintendent of horticulture for the city of New Haven. On a particularly busy days, he may take close to 50 calls, without ever ending a conversation with the words, "Sorry, we don't have it." He'll find out who does and call back.
White Flower Farm guarantees everything it sells, and Winchester is typically the one who placates dissatisfied customers. He is, to put it mildly, a soft touch with replacements, whoch he views as goodwill advertising. "Many people call with their boxing gloves on," he says during a lull between calls. "And you can't blame them. This seems to be part of what goes with the name 'mail order.' Many people write me later and say, 'I'm sorry, I thought you people were like the rest.'
