All Aboard

John Friel

New England Grows, our last winter trade show, is history. I got to Boston by train, a pleasant if not always-speedy transportation mode.

Amtrak #172’s pace ranged from creep to sprint to amble to drunken lurch, depending on the track condition and competing traffic. In Connecticut, for no apparent reason, we briefly went backwards.

Today, demoted below planes and automobiles, train travel bares the ugly side of every town you pass through. America’s railroad corridors are long, linear trash dumps. But not this trip.

This year’s scenery was uniformly pretty thanks to forgiving, blight-obscuring snow. The East Coast got several generous coats—nine storms and counting—concealing a multitude of crimes against nature and civilization. Snow can’t hide graffiti, but it’s a temporary cure for everything else.

The upside of being railroaded? I could read, write, text, email, surf the Internet, doze or stroll to the lounge car for a beer. Can’t do all that while flying or any of it while driving. I admired the New York skyline, spotted redheaded and harlequin ducks, and watched a seagull steal another seagull’s fish. My seat was roomier than any airplane offering below first class and cleaner than my car. But that’s damning with faint praise.

Working a booth solo limits how much else you can do. I was actually grateful for the snowstorm that kept Day 1 attendance thin, allowing me to catch keynoter Anna Ball. The next two days were busy, but I snuck out anyway. Don’t tell anybody, okay?

Anna’s most intriguing point: In the near future, “Plants will be about more than beauty.” Gen Yers and Millennials expect our products to multitask, like smartphones. She recounted how a young woman said of a plant, “It’s pretty, but what else does it do?”

Old friend Dale Hendricks presented “Thirty Years of Plant Introductions: Separating the Wheat From the Chaff.” The future, Dale opined, belongs to “plants and programs that solve problems.” Dale favors natives and permaculture, but these very different presenters had common threads. Dale’s “introductions that tell a story” echoed Anna’s “we have to start telling our cool stories.”

Some pundits say people don’t care whether plants are hardy. I beg to differ. Dale drew groans by mentioning Coreopsis Limerock Ruby—still a sore point a decade after its introduction. Dale asked, “What is success? Is it when the cash register rings, or when the consumer succeeds and wants more?”

Dale struck a conciliatory note about such faux pas. “We’re all learning,” he said, but “it’s our job to be skeptical.”

The last speaker I caught was greenwall designer McRae Anderson. I’ve long considered greenwalls unnatural by nature, a mass of precariously poised plants on life support. But they’ve been around for nearly 20 years. They adorn hotel lobbies, grocery stores and fast-food billboards. Properly planned and executed, said Anderson, they’re both beautiful and useful. At $25 to $200 per square foot, they’d better be at least one of those things.

Interior greenwalls actively filter air, absorbing toxins, exhaling oxygen. Exterior installations reduce cooling load, beautify city streets and—even snow can’t do this—solve graffiti problems. It’s tough to tag ferns and ivy with spray-painted, bubble-text gang slang.

Speaking of clean indoor air: Anna cited “O2 For You,” the Costa Farms program promoting indoor plants’ amazing ability to remove air pollutants from homes, offices and schools. A houseplant per 100 sq. ft. is the poor man’s greenwall. Isn’t that a multi-tasking, problem-solving story to tell?

If you don’t attend trade shows, if you never see any product but your own, you really don’t know if it’s good or bad. Who’s eating your lunch? Whose can you snatch? This is a friendly industry, mostly, and I love that. But we’re all seagulls at heart.

Air purifiers are a billion-dollar industry. Our products do their job without electricity, noise or filters. Instead of snatching at each other’s market share, let’s tell that story and unleash our inner seagull on the electronics industry. GP

John Friel is marketing manager for Emerald Coast Growers and a freelance writer.