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Grower Pascual Avalos helps bag another poinsettia at Green Things nursery, which supplies thousands of the festive holiday plants to area businesses. But increasingly, says owner Jan Westenborg, the business is expanding into other niches, including direct-to-consumer sales and low-water-use xeriscape plants.
Dean Knuth / Arizona Daily Star
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Business

Tucson nursery branches out from its holiday red

Poinsettias still a Green Things staple, but firm now courts variety of clients
By Dan Sorenson
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 12.02.2008
Green Things is known for its poinsettias, supplying thousands of the locally grown, bright-red-leafed plants to shopping malls for displays and to grocery stores for sale to customers.
But the retail and wholesale greenhouse plant business at 3235 E. Allen Road is increasingly about more than the striking holiday plants, though they still make up 15 percent to 20 percent of the company's business, says owner Jan Westenborg.
She's growing the local greenhouse business aggressively, using a variety of advertising media and other efforts to reach customers in the current tough economy.
Pulling back in hard times "is a mistake. You have to be more aggressive," says Westenborg.
She said when she bought the business nearly five years ago , it was known primarily for wholesaling tropical house plants to grocery store chains.
Since then, Westenborg has added several greenhouses, expanded the direct-to-consumer retail part of the operation and tried to stay up with the plant trends. Locally, that's meant more cacti and low-water-use plants such as salvia and lantana for xeriscaping.
But keeping up with national plant trends is important, says Westenborg.
"Trends? Huge trends," she says. "Say Martha Stewart decides white hydrangeas are the thing. Suddenly everybody wants white hydrangeas. Or container gardens. I don't know where they came from, but they're huge, gigantic."
She's also putting on a free lecture series that brings in customers Saturdays to learn about plants. (This week's lecture, Saturday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., will teach homeowners how to winterize their gardens.)
Simply keeping up product lines isn't enough, says Westenborg.
It's just as hard — and even more frustrating — to make consumers remember the nursery for some of its wider offerings, she said.
"We're expanding all sorts of the pottery that we sell," said Westenborg. "We have close to an acre of pottery. We've had it for two years. But people still come in and say, 'Oh, I didn't know you had pottery.' "
● Contact reporter Dan Sorenson at 573-4185 or dsorenson@azstarnet.com.
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