The Greenhouse Odyssey: Five-On Brigham’s Shoulders
By Lorraine Miller
RED LIGHT! Pull over. Who’s driving this machine? You’re all over the road. Don’t you have a plan or a scheme?
No. I don’t. Well, maybe a little. I’m flying by the Seat-of-My-Pants.
So far, my life as a business person has been part Providence, part Personal Choice. Providence was the weather and the kindness of others. It also took hold as I navigated the bureaucracy, leading me to helpful people and the gift of small acts. Choice was blurry vision, whim, curiosity, wild stabs, hard work, and money to pay for it all.
The first steps in construction and business operation are bureaucratic. Permits are required. The offices of licensing, building, and zoning aren’t stumbling blocks but, they are hurdles. The rules can seem arbitrary and the inspectors unsympathetic, but you can’t move forward without their approval.
I gathered my plat map, sketches and Stuppy greenhouse specs and slouched towards the Salt Lake City and County Building. The gentleman at the counter looked at the papers with feigned interest. He looked at me, for the first time, with surprise and suspicion on his face.
He asked me a bunch of questions and then he said, “you’re not zoned commercial.”
“I am,” I said.
He went to double-check and when he returned, he said, “you’re right. You are zoned commercial but, you don’t have any parking.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Then you can’t build it, sorry,” he said and walked away.
I went out in the hall. There was a large bust of Brigham Young, Builder of Empire,
I cached myself behind him to consider next steps. Shortly, the man left the office so I went back in. I spread my papers on the counter. The new clerk studied the engineering specs. He asked me questions about snow load and drainage. He said I wasn’t zoned commercial. I told him I was, but he went to check anyway. He asked me about parking. When I told him I didn’t have any he said “then I’m sorry, you can’t build it,” and he went to help someone else.
Back to the bust of Brigham Young. Soon, the second guy left.
I went back in.
A third man came to help me. I explained everything. He smiled at the brochures and diagrams.
“I love greenhouses,” he said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“I live near there so I know that property,” he said. “It’s weird because it’s zoned commercial but it doesn’t have any parking.’
“I know,” I said.
“That means you can only wholesale. Are you okay with that?” he asked.
“Just what I wanted,” I said.
While my fingers and toes suffered frostbite, my brain was warming to the idea of ‘wholesale only.’ It made sense.
1) When I closed the Grass Menagerie, I didn’t have a customer mailing list. We were long parted. 2) A foliage wholesaler had opened in Bountiful. 3) The grocery stores were beginning to carry houseplants. 4) I didn’t have any parking. 5) I had fallen in love with cactus and other succulents. 6) Just so there will be absolutely no confusion about what I sell, I named the place Cactus Growers of Utah.
I’m talking about choice, but really, I’m living the old saying, monkey see, monkey do. Borrowing and stealing ideas from my California growers, I built a Stuppy greenhouse. The design and construction of the redwood benches? Copied that. A gravel floor with concrete sidewalks? Follow the Way. A big work area for a potting bench, soil and supplies? Hang a painting on the wall and call it home.
Inventory: With a greenhouse, I’m no longer filling an east facing window box with cactus. Now I have a sunny cave to stock. For the first shipment, I flew to California and hand-picked the plants. I bought a lot of bubble flats – the 12x12 array. All the thumblings would be planted in 2” pots. I bought a ton of 6” field grown plants. They were wrapped in newspaper and boxed. The 4” cactus, already in pots, were packed 16 to a box and I bought the broadest variety possible. I bought a lot of odd-balls; Sea Onions, Uebelmannias, Rat Tails and Feather cactus.
The red Volkswagen van wasn’t capable of this kind of haul. We needed a trucking company. As was often the case, a customer helped me make the connection and I was able to buy 15 running feet on a semi.
When the truck pulled into the 7-11 parking lot and then backed across 20th East and into my driveway, only 12” from the house, I held my breath.
All the bare-root cactus and bubble flats had to be planted in plastic pots, hours of work and tons of soil. Once again, there was no bagged cactus mix on the market and, even if there were, the cost would be prohibitive.
I mixed my own. I bought a used cement mixer with a tilting bucket, wheels and an electric motor. Pumice came from Idaho, loam from a local nursery and peat from a distant bog. The exterior sign of the Grass Menagerie was trimmed to fit the surface of the potting bench as a table top. Friends and customers (who became friends) offered to help. Forming an assembly line, a few unwrapped the field plants, somebody mixed soil, and the rest of us wrapped our fingertips in band aids and planted. We laughed a lot and ate way too much pizza.
In the fall, I flew to California again.
I visited an elderly gentleman I’d become friends with. He owned a retail nursery, Avery’s Cactus Gardens in Escondido. Unfortunately, his nursery was located where the State of California wanted to build a highway. He was losing his nursery through eminent domain just as I had. He was broken-hearted knowing his life’s work would become a paved road. I was broken-hearted for him. I guiltily confess that I profited from his loss.
I bought much of his inventory, including a 3-headed Golden Barrel (Echinocactus grusonii) that was planted in his ‘not for sale’ garden. He said he’d had it for years. You can see it today, 45 years after I bought it. It’s planted directly in the ground at the Cactus & Tropicals Salt Lake facility. The books say they live an average of 50 years. This one is easily 60.
For me, it is a legacy to Mr. Avery. On a sad note, with the construction of a dam in east-central Mexico, Golden Barrels were essentially wiped out. In 2009, it was red listed as a threatened species by the IUCN or International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
In entering this strange new and spiney world, I wasn’t turning my back on foliage plants. They were my first love, my raison d’etre. The first line of cactus & Tropicals mission statement ‘is create beauty.’ Foliage plants do that. They have a powerful impact on our senses, warming a room and creating a feeling of wellness.
In fact, the health benefits of houseplants, air purification, stress relief, emotional and mental improvement are proven.
Cactus are beautiful too, but they require a different kind of ‘looking’. They’re more of a cerebral thing, like abstract art or complex wine. It may take time to develop a taste. But you can’t develop a taste for something you never see. My job is to make the introduction.