6/27/2014
Financial Topography
John Friel
For as long as I’ve been part of the green industry, our gurus have exhorted us to make our seasons less seasonal, to somehow backfill the credit-line-stretching fiscal Death Valleys without eroding the resource-testing fiscal Everests. It’s a noble goal, I guess, and we’ve made strides toward it.
But our sales chart will always have its peaks and troughs because eventually even the most ardent gardener has an “Enough!” epiphany. The mindset shifts out of creation mode and throttles back into maintenance mode. I doubt we’ll ever eliminate the E-word from gardeners’ vocabularies, except for those who skip to the next letter in the alphabet to describe their lack of willingness to put their knees, back and budget through another wheelbarrow load. Inevitably, the 6-pack on the garden center bench loses to the one in the refrigerator.
As I type, May is waning and the Enough! moment is still, knock wood, weeks away. Truckloads of mulch still trundle down every highway, garden center checkout lines are long, liners are plopping into pots to meet the later planting needs of landscapers and resilient (or resurgent) gardeners. The songs of the mower, blower, tiller and trimmer ring through the land in harmony with the cash register’s tintinnabulation. Chainsaws are mostly silent, having already cleared away limbs and whole trees felled by ice storms. The sun is shining. Let us make hay, play ball, fire up the grill. It’s the best of times.
The wholesale side of the industry has its own crazy seasons. June is, if not an Everest, at least a Pike’s Peak. But since my employer sells liners, “spring” began while snow still strained the greenhouses. Civilians—people outside the green industry, who neither know nor care how all that canned beauty mysteriously arrives at the garden center just in time for them to buy it and plant it—are surprised when I explain, while shoveling snow, that “No, we’re not anxious for spring, exactly; it’s here. We’re dealing with it already.”
In this year’s wholesale propagation version of spring, every week’s shipping was done with crossed fingers: Please, let these brave little plants survive the transportation ordeal and settle into new homes. Since we sell mostly tough stuff—perennials and ornamental grasses—that prayer is almost always answered. Still, shipping had much in common with school schedules: an exasperating string of delays, cancellations and second-guessing.
It’s amazing how quickly winter’s brutality fades from memory. Not so long ago, three of us struggled with chains and shovels to get a UPS truck unstuck when the driver blundered into the one area of our parking lot the plow had skipped. Those big brown beasts will never be mistaken for SUVs. Not so long ago, I snapped off icicles from the greenhouse gutters by wrapping my arms around them, like tree trunks, and rooted them in a snowbank—impromptu sculptures, pillars nearly as tall as me, flanking the office door. It took over a week and a couple of cold rains to melt them away completely.
It’s also fortunate that such memories melt away when the world’s dormant flora and migrant fauna wake, emerge, stretch and go about their beautiful business. No matter how tired you get of being cold, unlike the end of a gardener’s patience, saying “Enough!” doesn’t entitle you to hang up the shovel. As Yogi Berra said of a baseball game, winter’s not over until it’s over. We don’t get to vote it out of office.
I hope you’re having a record-breaking spring to make up for the bank-breaking, heart-breaking winter many of us just suffered through. According to an informal study by this publication’s Editor in Chief, most retailers had an enormous Memorial Day weekend, big enough to break not only records but backs, too.
Here’s hoping your spring is a mighty Everest. Here’s hoping the maintenance sales—seed, fertilizer, tools, trimmer string, charcoal, bird supplies, pre-planted containers for the gardener who said “Enough!” too soon and needs more color in her life—are a sturdy bridge across summer’s Death Valley.
GP
John Friel is marketing manager for Emerald Coast Growers and a freelance writer.