Canada’s Premier Urban Garden Center

Guest Post: Sandy, Plant Procurement Department

The odd person, and I mean odd, follows this web page and that is good for business so they say. At Summerhill Nursery and Floral we are still not so sure about the internet. Is it a fad? Is it here to stay? We’re going to keep fooling around with plants, we’ll fool around a little bit with the internet but we promise we will never ever ask you to like us on the social networking site with the five trillion dollar market capitalization. Promise.

I love garden centres even the terrible ones. Isn’t it fun to pull a rough gem out of the desiccated and decaying offerings of a crappy garden centre? You feel like you just saved someone’s life! I try to stock the garden centre so that the opposite happens when people shop here. I want our customer to participate in the proliferation of sound and interesting plant life. This is an obtuse way of introducing our best collection of woody trees and shrubs ever. I spend a lot of time walking the retail yard as a customer would and as of right now I don’t see a single dud in the main retail area and I don’t see much of anything I would characterize as boring. It’s not only my opinion. A few people have been coming up to me at the store accusing me of being bonkers. “These things look like they come from the moon,” one lady said. “Do they actually grow in Ontario?” Yeah, yeah, they grow here. Don’t panic.

I’m confident that you won’t find a better collection of dwarf conifers in Ontario. I’m also confident in saying the assortment of Japanese maples will impress anyone. You got to stop by and look. The way the guys and gals throw it together is astonishing.

I relish talking to our customers. The way we operate is heavily informed by these conversations. Sometimes customers complain that we are an expensive garden centre. I accept that to a degree. We stock a lot of unusual product which is often expensive. This is the first year in my recollection that so many customers have been telling me they think this thing or that thing is cheap. “I thought it would cost more,” or “Why so cheap?,” they say. We are not big on discounts at Summerhill Nursery but we do some bulk buys for the spring planting season so we can sell some of our great plants at a very fair price. The people that know are getting some great deals. Also I think our salespeople enjoy guiding the customer to the value in our offerings as well. We don’t teach our staff to up-sell our customers. Our model is more along the lines of finding out what the customer needs or wants and providing a few choices at a few different price points.

Finally I would like to make quick three different thoughts. One thought is that the time to buy shrubs, trees or perennials is right now. The selection is superior, the season is favourable and the atmosphere at the garden centre is good. My second thought is the May planting season is just about upon us. In a matter of days all hell will break loose. Everyone will be buying impatiens, begonias, geraniums, petunias and spikes. We will not update the web page during the high season (sorry Mum) and we may be very sleepy when we are serving you. But we love May. Not the way we love April but we love May too. Thirdly, we do not sell 6 foot high cedars anymore. They have them at the grocery store for $6 each or something like that.

- Sandy, April 22, 2012

Summerhill Nursery & Floral is Canada’s premier urban garden centre.