Wayside Gardens

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Wayside Gardens

Type of Company	Privately held
Founded	1920 Mentor, Ohio, USA
Headquarters	Greenwood, South Carolina, USA
Industry	Mail-Order Gardening
Products	Live plants, bulbs, garden art, and accessories
Website	www.waysidegardens.com

Wayside Gardens is a privately held mail-order gardening company based in Greenwood, South Carolina. Wayside Gardens caters to serious American garden enthusiasts who want the newest, most unusual plants, and also value gardenworthiness. In addition to more than 2,000 varieties of plants, Wayside Gardens also carries garden art and accessories for use in outdoor living spaces. Wayside Gardens distributes millions of catalogs every year and maintains an extensive Internet presence (www.waysidegardens.com). Since 1975, Wayside Gardens has been part of the Park Seed Company family of brands, which also comprises Park Seed, Park Seed Wholesale, and Park’s Landscapes. The 500-acre national headquarters site features 9 acres of gardens, including an All-America Selections trial ground, a Rose Garden, a container garden, and numerous other theme gardens.

1 Company History
- 1.1 A Catalog is Born
- 1.2 A Change of Scene
2 References
- 2.1 External Links

[edit] Company History

Wayside Gardens specializes in hard-to-find, unusual live plants. New varieties of Echinacea are a popular example. Photo by Ashley Sheets, provided courtesy of Park Seed Company.

In 1920, nurseryman Elmer Schultz and marketer/plantsman Jan Jacobs (J.J.) Grullemans pooled their individual talents and European horticultural backgrounds to bring to life their vision—to grow and market exciting, unusual, hardy ornamental plants of the highest quality, bred specifically for American gardens. Thus was born Wayside Gardens, a company that became a highly respected mailorder nursery business in the United States. According to a corporate brochure from 1986, Wayside Gardens became “legendary for the quality of its plants and bulbs, the excellence of its varietal selections, and the sophistication of its clientele.” From its earliest days, “Pedigreed Plants” and “Root Strength” were key corporate mottoes.

The new company was based in Mentor, Ohio, and developed rapidly. Close ties to the Dutch family bulb business in Holland gave Wayside Gardens an inside track on bulb introductions. And extensive contacts in Europe and Britain, as well as the United States, gave the firm access to new developments in woody and herbaceous cultivars.

The first page of the 1940 catalog extols the virtues of Wayside Gardens’ approach to breeding and growing the plants it sells. Image courtesy of the Wayside Gardens archive and Park Seed Company.

[edit] A Catalog is Born

To foster its growth, Wayside Gardens issued its first catalog in 1922, a 50-page, black & white edition printed by letterpress. The first four-color illustrations appeared in Wayside’s Imported and Native Bulb Catalog of 1933. The catalogs offered plants suitable for virtually every American climate—plants for shady and sunny areas, and those that performed well in many different soil types. In 1951, Fortune magazine acknowledged Wayside Gardens for its breadth, saying, “Wayside’s list of plant material permits it to sell to gardeners in every U.S. climate, and thus carry a truly national, across-the-board nursery business, the only one of its kind.”

Wayside Gardens has become almost as well known for the depth and breadth of its catalogs as for its plants. Professional plantsmen, landscapers, and horticultural schools actually use then as reference works because of the excellence of their photography and the accuracy of their descriptions and cultural recommendations.

Through these catalogs—and now, through its extensive Internet presence—Wayside Gardens has introduced many superior plants to the American gardening public, including: Lilium regale in the 1920s; Anthemis ‘Moonlight’ and Berberis Mentoriensis in the 1930s; Viburnum x Carcephalum, Ideal Darwin Tulips, and Weatherproof Daffodils, such as ‘Duke of Windsor,’ ‘Wodan,’ and ‘Mother Grullemans’ in the 1940s; Kniphofia “Maid of Orleans’ in the 1950s, Hosta ‘Royal Standard’ and the famous Rothschild Azaleas in the 1960s; Campsis ‘Crimson Trumpet’ in the 1970s; Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Snow Queen’ in the 1980s; and David Austin English Roses in the 1990s.

Wayside Gardens is part of the Park Seed family of brands, and is headquartered in Greenwood, South Carolina. Photo by Christa Hanson, provided courtesy of Park Seed Company.

[edit] A Change of Scene

Ten years after the death of J. J. Grullemans, Wayside Gardens became available for purchase. At that time, William John Park was CEO and Chairman of the Board of the Geo. W. Park Seed Company. He had grown up schooled in the horticulture business, and admired Wayside Gardens’ reputation and potential value. He had the foresight to realize that the Wayside Gardens product tradition was an excellent complement to the offerings of Park Seed Company, which had been providing seeds and bulbs to the American gardening public since 1868. Park Seed purchased Wayside Gardens in the autumn of 1975 and transferred it from Mentor, Ohio, to its present home in Greenwood, South Carolina.