Two: The Grass Menagerie
The building I rented on the corner of 1st South and 8th East in Salt Lake City had been standing empty for several years. Except for the patter of student feet on the floor of the apartment upstairs, the building was desolate. It would need a tremendous amount of work to clean it up and breathe life into it. I had the help of a friend, Stu Gelb, a man I had met in North Carolina who was a fellow VISTA volunteer. Since our work together, he had married, and he and his wife moved to Salt Lake City. Stu and I would be lifelong friends, and over the years of building out Cactus and Tropicals, he was always there to help me.
Other friends helped restore the building, too. After we flushed out the interior with a fire hose, we scraped the soap off the windows, scrubbed the 14’ high walls clean, and painted them a brilliant French’s mustard yellow. (Dark green foliage looks great against yellow.) We built shelving, counters, and display cases, and constructed a lodgepole pine pergola for hanging plants. After a few days, I heard the chittering of bark beetles in the lodgepole and found piles of sawdust on the floor. The pergola quickly became someone’s firewood.
In getting the shop ready to open, I checked off each task on a constantly evolving “to do” list that included all the government permits, licenses, and dispensations. Then there was all the business infrastructure stuff like banking, utilities, insurance, signage, yellow pages…
I scrounged for house plant suppliers. They were non-existent. At the time, grocery stores didn’t sell plants and Home Depot hadn’t yet been born. Finding a steady wholesale supply of house plants was a real problem. You can’t sell something you don’t have! I learned there were plenty of wholesale growers in Southern California; the question was how to get the stuff. The answer was my VW van and me. My mother watched the shop while I drove to San Marcos. Once there, I drove from one wholesale grower to another, buying every beautiful plant I saw. The van became a sardine can. I could barely close the doors and I couldn’t see out the rearview mirror. Saturday night I’d stay in a motel, be up before dawn, and home by 5:00 that afternoon, in time to unload before it got dark. I’d be ready to open the shop at 10:00 a.m. Monday morning.
One of the most important decisions I had to make was choosing a business name. I couldn’t have made a poorer choice. The Grass Menagerie was a terrible name, a solid lemon. Although, improbably, this is a lemon to lemonade story. The name drew a certain curious and adventurous type, folks looking for something other than house plants. (Did they really think I sold grass—a slang for marijuana in the ’70s?) The shop was within walking distance of the University of Utah, so I ran a $2.50 ad in The University Chronicle: “Wandering Jews Looking for a Home.”
I unlocked the doors and opened The Grass Menagerie to the public for the first time on July 5th, 1975. The huge paned windows faced east and south and the sunshine poured in. Greenery filled every nook and cranny. My own Emerald City. I was wonderstruck, in a sort of space/time warp, feeling like an escape artist but certainly not like an entrepreneur.
I felt an urgency to learn everything I could about plants and took a deep dive into horticulture and ornamental plant books. I discovered the bible of tropical plants, Exotica, by Alfred Byrd Graf. It’s a pictorial encyclopedia, just shy of 2,000 pages, weighing in at 5.5 lbs. Every plant has a photograph, a description, habitat information, and care instructions. With the aid of Exotica, I attached a handwritten card to each plant, giving its name and care requirements. (Sadly, Exotica is out of print today and difficult to find.)
I read Thalassa Cruso’s Making Things Grow: A Practical Guide for the Indoor Gardner. There were few pictures, but lots of advice that made common sense. Cruso explained why you shouldn’t get water on the leaves of an African violet and what to do about the dilemma of a shrinking root ball. I was curious, too, about the history of houseplants, given that in the wild, tropical plants don’t grow in containers. I wondered who and how plants or seeds were collected and how it was established they could even live in a pot. It turns out, archeologists have found evidence of container gardening dating back to 5,000 B.C. All I had to do was reintroduce them to the modern world. I wasn’t into Botanical Latin, medicinal or herbal plants, soil composition, insects, pesticides, fertilizer, cactus or photosynthesis—not yet.
I liked helping customers. People often came in with a preconceived notion of the plant they wanted or where they wanted to put it, whether on a table top or on the floor, tall or bushy, hanging or crawling. Others just wanted a plant that grabbed them, something beautiful or interesting. My job was to help them find it and give care instructions. Buying a houseplant is not like mindlessly dashing into the grocery store for a gallon of milk. Buying a houseplant is a sensory, soulful event, a “be here now” moment. It should be stress free. I wanted my customers to be successful growing plants and I wanted them to have a fun experience shopping for them. I wanted them to come back.
I desperately needed bookkeeping skills and took advantage of a program offered by the Small Business Administration called SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives). My seventy-five-year-old mentor was a woman from New Jersey, now retired to Salt Lake City, whose life’s vocation had been working as comptroller of a large nuts and bolts factory. (Keep in mind, computers were a thing of the future.)
Mrs. Worth rode the bus to my shop every other week. She brought me a 14 Column Ledger and showed me how to label the horizontal and vertical columns, enter totals, and double check my numbers. I called her “Mrs. ToThePenny.” After all, a misplaced decimal could be the difference between a dime and a dollar—or more! She insisted on a sharp #2 pencil. She taught me to distrust the column heading “miscellaneous,” and forced me to think deliberately about where to assign expenses. She taught me everything I needed to know, at least for the time being. I didn’t suffer the common problems of boredom or procrastination with bookkeeping. At the end of the month, I studied the column totals like they were a scoreboard or a prophecy.
I suppose some business-savvy person might have looked at my numbers, patted me on the head, and walked away with a sigh. But I wasn’t walking. I was running, cramming to be an entrepreneur. Besides learning about plants and the rudiments of bookkeeping, I had to be an advertising agent, janitor, buyer, sales force, delivery driver, and complaint department. Was I gasping at a fantasy? Could I shape my own destiny? At the very least, I’d have a hand in it.