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203 Chapter 11 “I’m Miss Grant, though married— and happily, too” Grant and Harris quickly realized they had set an impossible goal in the name they’d chosen for their new business. “By that time we had become rather sophisticated gardeners, so sophisticated that we had turned the perennial border from mixed colors to pure white—what the English call a moon garden,” Harris explained. This inspired their initial plan to grow only white perennials and flowering shrubs, and to call their venture White Flower Farm. Yet it was an impractical idea since few gardeners wanted to restrict themselves to whiteflowering plants, and the plants’ lack of stamina made them difficult to cultivate. Still, they kept this charming name (as well as the moon garden) for their nursery.1 Whatever name they decided on, they believed the time was ripe for a first-rate American horticulture business. Few mail-order nurseries offered either quality plants that were “true to variety” or imported plants that were not already popular and easily marketed. British nurseries, however, were selling excellent species, including new strains not available in the United States, so in 1949 they made the first of what would be many trips to England’s Chelsea Flower Show to consult with nurserymen there.2 White Flower Farm opened for business in 1950 but was far from an immediate success, in part because they struggled to find a manager. The first one lasted just two years, replaced by a married couple who stayed for only two more. “Our unconventional approach didn’t make sense to them,” Harris discovered. Not until the fall of 1954 did they find someone who shared their values and had the expertise they needed. At one of England’s finest nurseries they met twenty-nine-yearold David Smith, who had both—as well as an interest in moving to America. “If David had not been present in the spring of the following year when our managing couple returned to the Midwest,” Harris admitted, “the chances are that Grant and I would have folded Amos Pettingill’s tent and crept away.”3 Amos Pettingill was the pseudonym they created for the manager who was featured in some of the advertisements Harris wrote for newspapers. He originally used the name of their first manager, but after he left they realized, Harris said, “that starting a nursery from scratch was not going to be in the least easy, and we’d have so many changes in personnel in the future that featuring the ‘manager’ (of the moment) would get us nowhere.” So they settled on one unchanging fictional name that would help give the business a unique identity.4 Writing about White Flower Farm as Amos Pettingill, Harris created an appealing persona many customers thought existed in real life. Readers came to 204 Anonymous in Their Own Names know Pettingill best as the author of the nursery’s annual catalog, which House & Garden magazine called “even more a book to read and enjoy,” since “over ten of its eighty-eight pages are devoted to chatty philosophical commentary, and the descriptions and prices of plants for sale are well cushioned by information on how to plant, and how not to plant.” Harris was a gifted translator of specialized information into layperson’s language, mixing his plant descriptions not only with straightforward practical advice and discourses on topics such as the “pH factor,” but with self-deprecating accounts of his own mistakes, happy discoveries, and too-late revelations.5 Readers trusted Amos Pettingill, and his words persuaded more people to try growing plants not available from any other source. Grant and Harris were frequent travelers and often brought back unusual plants, looking for stock strong enough to survive the U.S. plant quarantine (sometimes none did). The hurdles of cultivating and selling these plants—such as the white forsythia they imported from South Korea in 1955 that proved a popular offering—were slowly surmounted because of the work of David Smith and Harold Calverley, another British nurseryman hired in 1955. Soon afterward they lured their head of production away from a Scottish nursery, and the enterprise’s “absentee owners,” as they called themselves, finally had a “horticulture core” that satisfied them.6 Harris admitted that during their early years they lost “more than I care to remember ,” but by 1960 White Flower Farm was an undisputed success. Its monthly payroll in busy seasons was $6,000, its plants were winning top honors at...

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