Maackia 025: New Noise

I’m Nathan Langley and this is Maackia, a monthly newsletter on yet another crazy idea! Maybe…

I would like to bounce something off all of you and solicit your thoughts. No pressure, but I am really curious what you think and what your experiences have been when you go shopping for plants. Good and bad. Feel free to reply to this email if you would like to share (thanks in advance!).

But first, let me back up a step.

I like Apple products (a shocking statement to many of you who know me, I know!). But more importantly, I have spent a good amount of time studying how the company functions (to the best one can for a private company like Apple, anyway). It’s just one of those things I enjoy reading about. One of the earliest things I found really fascinating about Apple is how they, over time, internalized the development and production of specific components that their current (and future) products were reliant on. The most obvious and recent example of this was their move away from Intel CPUs to their own internally developed M chips.

The benefits of this move are obvious in retrospect — a computer isn’t a computer without a CPU, never mind what they have been doing with the iPhone and iPad. Intel, in their hubris(?), seemingly became complacent and began limiting Apple in what products they were able to bring to market because of their increasingly poor timelines. Product lines were delayed, and things like the MacBooks were limited due to the decisions made by Intel.

When I was bright-eyed and bushy tailed during my master’s degree (HA!), I was convinced that internalizing and controlling the primary components within designs (ie: plants) was the way forward. I like plants, and I loved my time working in the UBC Botanical Garden’s nursery propagating them.

When I moved to Sudbury, I was lucky to find work with people at a locally owned and operated greenhouse that were incredibly supportive. Instead of limiting my designs to what was in stock, I was able to look at what our suppliers could provide and bring in different plants regularly.

Unfortunately, I lost sight of my original goals during the next few years, as I didn’t need to control those supply lines. I had people I enjoyed working with, and we supported each other even though I went out on my own after one season of working at the greenhouse.

You can probably guess what eventually happened. The business changed hands, and the relationship I had with the greenhouse shifted.

I now find myself thrust back into the same boat that everyone else finds themselves in — I am limited to what is in stock locally. I have to rely on the whims of other external businesses, who do not have the same goals as I do. This ultimately reduces my ability to compete with other landscape-oriented businesses in town because we are all pulling from the same sources.

My clients also suffer because the gardens they are paying to have designed can end up looking very similar to their neighbour’s garden down the street. Not because I want it to, but because the components of both gardens are largely the same. I just can’t bring in the plants I am excited about like I used to a few years ago! And while I know that I provide services far greater than what the garden looks like in the end, that is the part that everyone in the neighbourhood sees.

Fast-forward to last year, where the thought of controlling primary components within my designs resurfaced after reading about the life and career of Piet Oudolf in his book Hummelo. Funny enough, he, too, ran into similar problems. He wanted to use plants from other places in the world that no one was supplying where he lived. So he did it himself and set up a propagation facility where he grew and bred plants that he was interested in. To heck with what other people were trying to sell! This allowed his design business to flourish because he knew exactly what he could do and what was available to him at all times.

He eventually turned his nursery into a second business, where he sold plants he was excited about to the public as word began to spread about his work. But even more so, he eventually designed and installed gardens using those very plants in the grounds surrounding the nursery. If someone wanted to work with him but was unsure about his “style” or the plants he was using, he could just invite them over and walk with them around the gardens so they could see things for themselves.

These gardens also came with an added bonus — they allowed him to see those plants every single day. He could actively measure how they performed through the seasons without having to coordinate with past clients to view their gardens sporadically. If there is one lesson I learned from working at the greenhouse, it’s this: you can’t underestimate the benefits of seeing plants every day at their best and worst.

These lessons are so simple and seemingly obvious that I am frustrated with myself that I lost sight of the path forward that I knew was promising. Maybe I didn’t have the ears for it at the time, and instead filed the thought about controlling design components away in the back of my head until I was ready. Regardless of the reason, the thought is now front and centre!

I’m not really sure what the shape of these realizations will take. I am really curious what your shopping experiences have been like over the years. I don’t think operating a traditional nursery is in the cards in the short term (or at all?), but I need to figure out a way forward that stabilizes the supply of plants that I can draw from for my designs.

Perhaps I should start small and work on creating a “dream garden” at home first so that I have something to showcase regularly? Or maybe I should order more than I need to create these gardens each spring so that I have material on hand to use in my design work for clients?

I don’t know — I think I have to sit on this for a bit and think things through more. Luckily, it is too late to do anything drastic for this year! I can take my time, think about the entire system, and find a path forward.

n