"Take that caller from Illinois earlier this morning. He ordered two hollies from us two years ago. He put them under a dense oak tree where they received too much shade. Now there was no moral responsibility on our part to offer him replacements. They are not on our shade-tolerant lists, so they shouldn't have been planted there. On the other hand, he seemed like a decent enough Joe. I see the replacement of those two hollies, at about $25 plus shipping, not as a minus, but as a plus. We'll have a person who was so surprised we would do this that he'll talk to everybody at the office about it, and we'll have a spokesman in Illinois."
Winchester signed on with White Flower Farm because he was impressed with the emphasis on quality by director of horticulture Smith and with the clear signal sent by Wadsworth. "He told me he wanted a horticulturist who could give the right answers. There was no implication I would have to bend to commercial pressures," says Winchester. "If Eliot was selling motorcars, I think I would have been tempted to work here."
The fact is, Eliot Wadsworth charms and impresses almost everybody who meets him. Perhaps because he attended prep school, Harvard, and Harvard Business School, or because of that roman numeral after his name, or because he's as apt to be reading Shakespeare as the business section of the newspaper, people assume he hails from money. In fact, his upbringing was strictly middle class -- and New England Yankee. He is smart, handsome, and, in old-fashioned parlance, a "well-rounded individual."
If there is a sticking criticism of White Flower's owner, it is that he tries to do -- and does -- too much. All the recent logistics for a White Flower tour of English gardens were mapped out by Wadsworth, who personally scouted lodgings and restaurants. "It was fun," he says. A longtime follower of Horticulture magazine, and with no more publishing experience than his own mail-order catalog, he talked The New Yorker into buying the ailing magazine with him in 1981 and soon turned it around. Three years ago, White Flower was named a finalist in a magazine advertising competition sponsored by the Magazine Publishers Association. Listed alongside big Madison Avenue ad agencies as producer of the White Flower ads was the Isaiah Smith Agency of Litchfield, Conn. Who's Isaiah Smith? "Well, that's me, too," says Wadsworth.
"He has so much energy and enthusiasm that he has a tendency to say, 'I'll take care of that." Then he gets a call and there's just not enough time," says Lesley Nelmes. "If he were perhaps a little more realistic about his limitations. He'll say he'll take the photographs [of a particular flower for the catalog], but when that flower is in bloom, he's in Boston." She feels he needs to delegate more authority to the topflight managers he has hired. Because he so often "steps into somebody else's niche," Nelmes says, "he deprives them of the satisfaction of doing a job themselves."
Wadsworth pleads guilty, admitting he should have been entrusting more to others far sooner. Whether it's sooner or later, given his present schedule, some delegation seems inevitable.
Visited one morning last spring in his Litchfield office, Wadsworth -- wearing a green cable-knit sweater, khaki pants, tasseled loafers, and socks closer to pink than red -- had a healthy glow. There was no sign, as noon approached, that he'd been up for nearly eight hours. He'd left home in Brookline, Mass., before five, and, with a hired student behind the wheel, had sat in the backseat under a reading light porting through his briefcase during the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Litchfield. Since moving his family from the cottage at the farm to Brookline, each week he shuttles from one side of New England to the other. Restrained by his Yankee notion of how to grasp purse strings (tightly), which also limits him to $35 motel rooms, Wadsworth travels in an American sedan so undistinguished it might moonlight as an unmarked police car.
With his workday now approaching 12 hours, Wadsworth quits his office for a late-afternoon walk. His son, Eliot, he says, has worked at the farm the past two summers, putting in a couple of hours a day and punching a time clock. Eliot is eight and already knows the names of two to three dozen flowers and perhaps half that many weeds. Wadsworth's oldest daughter, Eve, age five, will start next summer. Natalie, but two, will have to wait. The notion seems a bit old-fashioned, but it would not displease Wadsworth if one of his children eased into his rubber gardening boots one day.
He passes his cottage and heads through a newly cleared meadow toward some recently planted elms. He stops by one of them, and rubs his hand along a crack where the bark has split. "The south side," he says. "The tree probably needs water." On he continues, to a hill overlooking what some employees refer to as "Lake Wadsworth." The one-acre pond was formerly a swamp. Snowshoeing there one day, Wadsworth saw that it hadn't frozen over and realized it must be spring-fed. He recently had the swamp cleared and an irrigation pond carved out, which also doubles as a place to swim and fish. Nearby, under a stand of mature oak trees, he planted laurel, rhododendrons, and azaleas in what he calls "a knockoff of a hillside at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh."
Walking back, a half moon shows in the fading blue of a brilliantly clear afternoon. Though it is barely sweater weather, Wadsworth worries aloud about the possibility of a frost that night. Back inside the office he asks for $20 from petty cash for the drive back to Boston. He's offered $30, but turns down the extra $10. "I'd probably just blow it," he says. After retrieving his overnight gear from the cottage, he is soon in his car and headed down the lane, past the gardens. Pasted on the back window of the sedan is a bumper sticker: Amos Pettingill for President.
