The Greenhouse Odyssey: Eight-Of Seas and Sales
By Lorraine Miller
This story is dedicated to the shipping and receiving department at Cactus & Tropicals.
In 1769, a British botanist named Joseph Banks sailed with Captain James Cook on the H.M.S. Endeavor from England to Tahiti.
Joseph Banks was the botanist to King George III and a founder of Kew Gardens in London. His motive for joining Capt. Cook was to collect and identify as many plants as possible from Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, something that had never been done before. He took along eight botanists, and they described and illustrated thousands of plants. Elaborate methods were used to identify and store cuttings and seeds.
Banks was friends with a Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy and Botanical Latin. Both men were mentors to dozens of young naturalists. Over the next several years, students were sent all over the world to collect seeds and cuttings. Often, they traveled alone.
Their tales of trampling blindly through South Africa, Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, the Hudson River Valley, Brazil, Iceland, South Wales, Australia and other foreign ports are harrowing.
Some sailed off and were never heard from again. Some spent months collecting and carefully packing their findings to send back to England on a passing ship, only to have the ship swallowed in the waves. Sometimes a collection was frozen at sea or inundated with salt water.
Some botanists caught a ride home on a passing ships that was overtaken by pirates. Many of them died from fever or starvation. Of the eight botanists who sailed with Cook and Banks, only two returned to England.
But other collectors were just plain lucky, returning to Kew Gardens with spectacular surprises: the Giant Bird of Paradise, 40 species of Geranium, Gardenias and weird Euphorbias. Excited by their discoveries, they immediately found a berth on another brig and jumped ship, where every plant looked plentiful and collectable.
After returning to England, Joseph Banks didn’t sail again. Instead, he stayed in London and received his students’ collections, the condition of much was maddening. Sometimes the cuttings were dry and withered, leaving nothing but crumbs. Others arrived soggy and moldy. And some were duplicates of plants already received and catalogued.
This is 1983. Why am I writing about things that happened 200 years ago?
Because Cactus & Tropicals Greenhouse construction is finished and like Kew Gardens, it must be planted! For the first time, I’m going on a buying trip to Homestead, Florida. I imagine how the young botanists felt, heading alone into an unknown tropical forest, knowledgeable of practically nothing, not even how to get their stuff home. But the anticipation of finding something new and fantastic overshadowed any number of fears.
My plane landed in Miami around midnight. By the time I got my rental car and drove to Homestead, it was two in the morning. I was exhausted. I was lost, too. It was a moonless night. Even the stars were obscured by the steamy night air. For all I knew, I was in Tahiti. I bobbed about the dark streets until I found my motel and crashed.
Up at 7 in the morning, I was singing my high school fight song in the shower, “On to Victory, we’re going to win today; here’s why...“
Eight sharp and I’m in front of the first greenhouse. It was vast! Ficus Benjamina was under a poly roof, as far as the eye could see. Acres of Chinese Evergreens, Sansevieria and Dracaena marginatas. Golf carts to shuffle you about. Some plants were grown under shade cloth with no side walls at all. Other plants, like bromeliads, were in hot houses, which were hot and humid. Spathiphyllum, or peace lilies, were in 10,” 12,” and 14” containers and the leaf sizes had as much variety, all the way from Spath ‘Petite’ to Spath ‘Surpreme.’
Driving from grower to grower in Homestead was like sailing through a sea of green. Field crops stretched for miles.
Periodically, I’d see a group of Jamaican or Haitian women, dressed in bright colors, floral bandanas wrapping their hair, bending in the field. Empty bushel baskets, striped red, were stacked bottom-up in pyramids on one side of the field, with trucks loading full baskets on the other.
I didn’t have time for sight-seeing. I had a lot of growers to visit. Although many of them grew the same thing, some grew it better. Many grew varieties that were unique to them. I had to compare cost and quality. In this work of choosing growers and their products, first impressions had to be relied on. I was struck by how some greenhouses were neat and orderly.
As one grower put it, “the plants should look like little soldiers standing in a row.”
Other greenhouses were strewn with empty soil bags, tools left behind or dirty and cluttered walkways. Naturally, I questioned how much care would be taken in pulling an order for Cactus & Tropicals. Would the plants be clean and healthy, well-wrapped for shipping?
Trust and honesty are critical in good relationships, whether it be with friends, family, or business associates.
I had to establish credibility and credit with the growers. They’d never heard my name. One asked if Utah was in the United States. Many of them probably never had a female customer. It made sense that they required payment before shipping my first order, but would they give me 30 days to pay when I placed my second order?
I, on the other hand, was about to give them several thousand dollars, then board a plane and fly away. I couldn’t fly to Homestead and handpick plants every time I placed an order, either. There were a lot of things to consider in choosing our new growers but I definitely liked the ‘little soldier’ idea. I thought a clean and orderly greenhouse operation was illustrative of how the whole company was run. And I was always looking for models or better ways of doing things.
Homestead was the place to find a shipping company, too. Plants can’t travel on any vehicle. They have to be in a reefer or refrigerated trailer. The distance from Homestead to Salt Lake is a little over 2500 miles.
The weather conditions can fluctuate along the way, so it is essential that the trailer be temperature controlled and kept constant. The Florida growers were able to recommend professional trucking companies that traveled as far west as Utah. Without their advice, I would have been truly at sea.
I had no idea how many plants it takes to fill a semi-trailer. The growers helped me there, too. When the truck arrived in Salt Lake and straddled 20th East, stopping traffic for a couple of blocks, wriggling back and forth and inching its way up the driveway, we were there, ready to unload our precious cargo. Hard work with a glorious result. Hundreds of little soldiers at Cactus & Tropicals, all dressed in green, stood in a perfect row.