Too many new varieties to choose from?

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Sunday, 24 June 2007

With new plant varieties introduced each year, retailers face the daunting task of selecting what to carry and what to discard.

Three retailers open up about how they select their plants each year in the face of so many introductions.

Homewood Nursery and Garden Center in Raleigh, N.C.

Joe Stoffregen, president

Homewood takes a multifaceted approach when selecting new varieties of plants for the garden center.

Roundtable approach

After every season, Stoffregen gathers staff, data and brokers for the plants for a meeting to discuss a number of factors when it comes to selecting varieties for the next season.

“It happens every season. When we finish Christmas, spring and fall, we will sit down and do this because of the sheer volume of plant materials we have,” he said. “It is a complicated process of picking new varieties. This is our 40th year in business and for 40 years we’ve been going through this.”

The production manager, who is in charge of greenhouses, attends the meeting as does the assistant growers. They give feedback on what they think they should grow more or less of, he said. Other people involved include seed company representatives and plant brokers.

“If you have a good relationship and trust them, it is crucial to involve them and hard to do without them,” he said. “There is not a high turnover with people in those positions and they want your business, so they typically won’t just try to get numbers up because they know the relationship is an important component to their business.”

He gets feedback from his sales staff as well as the growers.

Using a point-of-sale system, Stoffregen can compare sales of the 4-inch pots of geraniums, for example, and consider cutting back on that crop if sales decline each year over a few years.

“We talk to our growers, who are responsible for producing the plants, and the salespeople, to talk about reasons why people bought or didn’t buy particular plants. It may be that white impatiens sold big for two weekends in a row because that was all we had at the time,” he said.

“We will talk about what we grew the year before and what may not have been as popular,” Stoffregen said. “If we decide not to grow something, we can replace it with something new. We have a full greenhouse, so we can’t pick out 20 new annuals and 10 new perennials. It is almost an evolutionary process of examining what was the weakest link in the annuals or didn’t do as well.”

Look at local gardens

Rather than get information from trial gardens at universities, Stoffregen and his staff visit landscapes around Raleigh.

“Last year, we went around Raleigh looking for perennials that were still looking good in late summer. We took pictures and if we couldn’t find what variety it was, we’d ask around. When we got ready to sell that plant, we could tell customers we saw that variety at a particular shopping center or locale,” he said.

To help identify plants, they took the digital pictures to a grower.

When Homewood made the wrong choice

Several years ago, the garden center took a chance on a new variety of perennial called Brise d’Anjou. It was supposed to be variegated shade-loving perennial alternative to hostas, Stoffregen said.

“It was pretty and we read about it in a couple of magazines. We did about 1,200 in 1-gallon pots in a huge display in front of the garden center,” he said. “We wrote up ‘new perennial, loves shade, should succeed in our region’ for the signage.”

Homewood discovered it was not as heat tolerant as promised, “but we jumped on bandwagon quickly and in a big way and every one died,” he said.

The cashiers were told to give a refund to anyone who bought one and the garden center ended up issuing refunds for 50 percent of the crop.

“It is our reputation. When we sold them, they were beautiful,” he said. “That plant is still on the market, but it did not grow well in our region and the wheels just came off.”

What Homewood learned

The key to learning from a mistake is to make sure the plant is tested in your region, Stoffregen said. “Ask the question ‘did you test it somewhere in our region?’ We really do look for that now. If they didn’t test it regionally, but they feel confident of its ability to thrive in your area, then find out what the minimum is on it,” he said. “We’ll grow it and then see how it does. We tell the salespeople that we don’t know how well it is going to perform in our heat.”

Armed with that information, if the gardener is intrigued by the exotic nature of the plant, then the gardener can choose to take a chance on it. Stoffregen said there are always some customers who want to try something new.

“We learned not to create a feature display singing its praises before we have a track record,” he said. “That was several years ago and we learned our lesson the hard way.”

Wenke Greenhouses in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Lisa Wenke Ambrosio, production manager

At Wenke Greenhouses, there is no target number for how many introductions are made each year, said Ambrosio, production manager for the garden center.

“I feel like for the season we’re in right now, the amount of changes that we did were huge. But it wasn’t all in the varieties, but in the packaging,” Ambrosio said. “I believe that most customers don’t know the plants in the first place. They don’t necessarily notice if it is new or not.”

When deciding what to stock for the next big season, Ambrosio talks to breeders and examines her own business.

‘Will it benefit customers?’

“When I’m looking at the new items, the first thing I try to decide is what benefit will there be for the customer,” Ambrosio said.

She has her customer prototype, which she has named Susie. So Ambrosio will ask: What is in it for Susie? Is it something about the plant itself, such as outstanding garden performance or is it a new color, new texture or does it have some new way of using it?

“It is very common for me to ask the breeders how this (new breed) benefits Susie, and it is not unusual that they don’t have an answer,” she said. “They’re spending all this money breeding things and there is no benefit.”

However, if the new breed helps the retailer produce it more efficiently, then there is a benefit.

“Sometimes we pick a new item because it is a little bit easier to grow, so we can grow it more efficiently. There have been new, fantastic flowers that can come from seeds. It may not be a new plant, but it is more efficient for us to produce. [Susie] won’t see the benefit, but it is easier for us to produce,” Ambrosio said.

Items: really new or repackaged?

“There are very few new plants any more. If you read the different magazines, there are 1,000 new items that they have, but almost all of those are a knockoff of something that is already there or a slightly different shade. Pretty much 99 percent of the time Susie wouldn’t know that the new items being promoted are new. They might be new for the inventor, but not new for Susie,” Ambrosio said.

Most of the new products at Wenke Greenhouses aren’t new at all. They’re just repackaged.

“It will be new to them if it is packaged in a new way. We’re taking colored pots and coordinating them. It is not a new variety of pansy, but one color coordinated with a pot. That is a new item to me and, so far, that has been very, very popular. It is all about packaging, color and decorating.”

Wenke’s creates ‘combos to go,’ which is a white basket with eight smaller pots inside.

“When Susie plants that collection in her patio pot at home and makes that combination planter, there is nothing new in the plants. Just new in the packaging with two of each variety and she’s really happy with what she’s gotten,” Ambrosio said. “Putting them together with a pot and tag that coordinates color gives them uniformity among types.”

Additionally, Wenke’s uses a custom tag with the custom pot, so it gives Susie the information she needs.

Ambrosio said the packaging is designed to make gardening easier for customers to find what they need. The first thing the tag tells her is if the plant is trailing, mounding or an upright plant. Then, it provides information regarding if the plant blooms all summer, for instance.

“We place the information on the bottom to tell her if the plant requires easy attention, moderate or a dedicated gardener,” she said. “Almost all the new things we’re doing are to make it easy for her.”

The same packaging system is in place for vegetables, too. The tags explain the benefits of each vegetable and which variety it is. For tomatoes, the tag may tell if they are good for sandwiches or good to eat green. Wenke’s has new herb collections featuring an 8-inch pot with four or five varieties in it. One is best for pizza or Italian dishes.

“This helps Susie know how she is going to use those herbs and make it simple for her to understand,” Ambrosio said.

Trial gardens can help -- sometimes

Ambrosio likes getting information from trial gardens like Kent State, Michigan State and the University of Georgia. However, she gets frustrated at the politics that seem to accompany the results.

“I want someone to say that this item is a dog, but they don’t do that,” she said. “They always come back that this is the best caliber of a plant when what would be more accurate is that this might be the one that survived one day longer. It is still a bad plant, but the trial garden places are getting paid by the companies. They may have 100 different varieties of a different plant, they only use five and that supplier sent …to put in their gardens.”

She said she puts more stock in her own trial gardens.

“Trial gardens are very important to me and my yard is one, so I do pay a lot of attention at the varieties that do well,” she said.

Altum’s Horticultural Center and Landscape, Zionsville, Ind.

Dana Altum, owner

For Altum’s, selecting new products or simply eliminating another product revolves largely around picking the best performers.

Get what you want from growers

Part of the process of picking top performers is being informed, Altum said. That can be done through reading the media, attending trade shows and talking to growers to find out what is the better variety.

“A lot of times, we have to direct the growers. Sometimes they tend to grow the same thing every year and it is important to me that the growers grow for us what we want,” Altum said. “We are not married to a line. We try to get the best and most reliable products from our experience. We’ll select items based on what we’ve had good luck with or what customers liked.”

Altum maintains close contact with growers and meets with them to review what combinations were successful and what plants died.

“We’ll ask them what new varieties are out there and what might be good for us. We’re always saying what the top 10 are for our zone and our customer base and expand from there.”

For more: Joe Stoffregen, Homewood Nursery and Garden Center, (919) 847-0117; www.homewood.citysearch.com. Lisa Wenke Ambrosio, Wenke Greenhouses, (269) 349-7882; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; www.wenkegreenhouses.com. Dana Altum, Altum’s Horticultural Center and Landscape, (317) 733-4769; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; www.altums.com.