- Wisconsin Growers Add Garden Center
- By Jane Metcalf
Wisconsin Correspondent
- With a business name like America’s Best Flowers, Ed and Carol Knapton have a lot to live up to. Not only do they do that by growing quality plants, but they have parlayed a thriving u-pick fruit and vegetable operation into a complete retail garden center by listening to the interests of their customers, being willing to make changes and keeping up - and ahead of - trends.
In 1977, the Knaptons started Berry Hill Farms on the Marshall, Wis. farm that has been in the Knapton family since 1848. Berry Hill Farms started as a u-pick strawberry, raspberry and asparagus operation. At one time, they had 23 acres of strawberries, 35 acres of u-pick and farm-market vegetables, five acres of trellised raspberries and two acres of asparagus.
In 1983, a fire at their farm meant the loss of all their production equipment, so Ed started working off the farm at the University of Wisconsin Arlington Research Farm during the day and at The Wisconsin Cheeseman, a Madison gift-cheese business, at night. The next spring, Ed was asked to serve as groundsperson for The Wisconsin Cheeseman and, by the time he left the company in1990, he was putting his education in engineering to work by serving as acting plant engineer. As groundsperson, Ed became frustrated at the quality of bedding plants available to beautify the grounds, and he asked if he could grow the flowers himself.
“That’s how we got started in flowers,” he says.
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- Keeping their u-pick enterprise intact, they started growing bedding plants and hydroponic tomatoes in their first 22x148-foot greenhouse in 1986. Both Ed and Carol knew that, for the greenhouse business they had in mind, they needed to be closer to Madison and they needed to have access to natural gas to heat their greenhouses. In 1990, they bought a landscaping business and 30 acres on Vilas Hope Road, Cottage Grove - just a mile east of Madison and I-90 - and added landscape maintenance to their palette. The Wisconsin Cheeseman was one of their first landscape-maintenance customers.
In 1993, they moved their three greenhouses from the farm near Marshall to their Cottage Grove location. As one segment of their business grew, they phased out less-profitable enterprises. They continued landscaping installations until 1994, u-pick strawberries until 1995 and landscape maintenance until 1999. In 1999, they went from selling just plants to the concept of a complete garden center.
As much as the Knaptons liked the u-pick strawberry operation - it once was a mainstay of their business - they found it conflicted with their growing bedding-plant enterprise.
Today, America’s Best Flowers has a total of 12 polyethylene-covered greenhouses. They sell 1,500 varieties of annuals, 1,500 varieties of perennials, 20,000 hanging baskets, a full range of vegetables, trees and shrubs, plus gardening equipment, seeds and accessories. Between greenhouse and outdoor areas, there’s five acres devoted to the growing and retailing of plants.
The Knaptons view their business as having six or seven “seasons”, each of which segues into the next. Seeds, bedding plants, perennials, vegetables, herbs, flower baskets and containers, fall flowers, u-pick pumpkins, houseplants and Christmas gifts and flowers bring customers to their door year-round. Last year, America’s Best Flowers had $1.8 million in gross sales, with 25% from the sale of hanging baskets.
The Knaptons were among the first in the country to sell bedding plants at satellite locations. In the late 1980s, they bought two portable 40x100-foot greenhouses and sold flowers at busy shopping locations in Sun Prairie and east Madison. They now have four satellite locations - at Sun Prairie Rentals; Menard’s, a home-improvement chain, in both Monona and the Madison EastTowne shopping center; and Sears at Madison’s WestTowne shopping center - and they account for 20% of their gross sales.
“It was a totally new concept in this area,” Ed recalls. “There were a lot of farmers’ markets that sold bedding plants, but no one was setting up a greenhouse and then bringing in their own plants and their own people to run them.”
While a temporary greenhouse at a major shopping center or store is no longer an unusual sight, the shift in the industry is to store-owned greenhouses where staff often lack sufficient training to provide quality customer service, he added.
With two acres of greenhouses, America’s Best Flowers is considered the largest greenhouse facility in Dane County and the largest high-tech greenhouse in Wisconsin. It was only the second garden center in the United States to have greenhouses with roofs that open up to control temperatures and add light and air movement; there are no exhaust fans. Floors are heated with a hydronic system, and greenhouses are equipped with a flood floor system for irrigation. The Knaptons have 6,600 baskets on an Echo Hanging Basket Triple system that moves three tiers of baskets under stationary irrigators. Their computer system controls all irrigation and environmental functions, taking into account such conditions as ambient temperature, humidity, water pH and wind.
America’s Best Flowers employs five full-time workers and one part-time worker on a year-round basis. By March, as many as 15 people are working to prepare the retail area and transplant plugs, but at peak, the Knaptons employ about 70 workers.
Both Ed and Carol agree managing people is one of the most challenging aspects of their business.
“It boils down to communications,” Ed maintains. “You have to communicate what your vision is and where you want to go.”
“You have to make them a part of it,” Carol adds. “They have to be able to give input and make decisions. “
Managing change is both a challenge and a goal of the Knaptons.
“Keeping the business growing and juggling everything is a challenge,” Carol says. “You’ve got to mesh it all together and continue to grow and look at where you’re heading.”
The Knaptons have seen many changes since they first started in the fruit and vegetable business. At that time, the bedding-plant industry was virtually non-existent, and greenhouses were just beginning to buy plugs for transplanting from growers. Currently, they see consumers planting more perennial beds, a growing popularity in cutting annuals, flowerbeds that are smaller than in the past, and fewer flowers planted in the ground. There are, however, more containers and hanging baskets.
The Knaptons are using a new point-of-sale computer system to their best advantage in a number of ways, including offering a “loyalty card” to customers. Staff can track the purchases of repeat customers, and the computer program allows them to keep helpful notes for customers, like the size of their lawn, for example. Loyal customers are rewarded with lower prices, special promotions and gifts.
“We’ve grown because we’re pretty connected to our customers,” Ed says.
Besides listening to what their customers want, Ed and Carol keep abreast of trends by going to flower trials, and that effort sets them apart from many garden centers. In the past year, the Knaptons examined varieties at flower trials in Pennsylvania, Canada, New York, Colorado and Washington, plus several in the Midwest.
“We see a lot of flowers,” Ed stresses.
Most years, they offer between 20 to 30 new varieties, but this year, they will offer close to 100 new varieties.
What’s ahead for America’s Best Flowers? Plenty, if the Knaptons have their way. In the short term, they would like to build another garden center on the west side of Madison. In the long term, though, they’re considering franchising.
The Knaptons have a vision of 50 greenhouse production areas - one in each state - that would feed its nearby garden centers.
Since transportation is a big factor in total production costs, production centers would need to be within 500 miles - or better yet, 200 or 300 miles of where plants would be sold.
“There are national home improvement chains and other retail chains and restaurant chains, but no chain garden centers,” Ed notes. “There have been attempts to do it, but it really hasn’t paid off. . . because the garden centers that have tried to become national chains weren’t growers.”
As the Knaptons’ enterprise has grown and changed over the years, it has remained a Christ-centered business, and they believe there are many more such businesses than most consumers are aware.
“We need to set an example and live the way our religion teaches us to do,” Ed says.
