A love of plants is, of course, at the heart of what makes a nurseryman a nurseryman, but all too often, this passion can get in the way of business acumen and therefore a successful business venture.  In Boskoop, The Netherlands, long considered to be the horticultural capital of Europe, a number of smaller nurseries have managed to turn their passion for plants into small but successful nursery companies serving equally small but important niche markets.

One such company is owned and operated by nurseryman Mark — with the assistance of his parents, the original founders of the company — and a small but expert staff which also includes his brother.   By North American standards, the two hectare (five acre) nursery is very small, but it is typical of the hundreds of nurseries that are located in this ‘nursery town.’   Although most of the nurseries located in Boskoop tend to specialize in one or two crops, Mark’s nursery produces an incredible array of plants — more than 3,000 different items at last count.

“Our clients,” explains Mark, “are real plants-people.  They know exactly what they want, and generally what they want can’t be found at a typical garden center or nursery.  These plants are special to them, perhaps as part of a collection or because they know the plant is rare.  Usually the varieties these customers are looking for are not in vogue and often they may not even be particularly visually attractive to the average person.  For them, it’s the thrill of having something that’s rare, that no one else has in their gardens.”

Mark’s clientele are retail customers as well as landscape contractors that also base their reputations on providing their own clients with out-of-the-ordinary landscape designs and plantings.  And, being one of a handful of nurseries in the area known to cater to the demand for the different and the hard-to-get, customers come from across Europe to scout out plants for their gardens.

The emphasis is almost entirely on woody plants.  Most are self-propagated, but on occasion they do find it necessary to purchase liners for growing on.  Mark also has a reputation as a skilled propagator, and he does have some standing orders from other nurseries for lining out stock.  Because production quantities of each variety are very limited, overall container production tends to not be very practical.  A mere 1,000 square meters (about 1,200 sq. yds.) is devoted to container production, and the rest is in field production.  “On the whole, for the type of product we grow and the clientele we serve, we find there’s a real preference for the quality one can only achieve with field production,” explains Mark.  “These clients don’t worry about dirt and they’re not impressed with pretty pots and labels.”

Due to the company’s commitment to product quality and because customer demand is difficult to predict, Mark only pre-digs a limited number of plants on spec for summer sales.  Instead, most plants are dug only when ordered, meaning that virtually all sales are in the summer and fall months, at a fairly consistent 60/40 ratio.    

Although the nursery produces an astonishing variety of inventory, quantities of each are very limited.  And while the inventory selection defies the generally accepted definition of specialization, Mark does admit to a preference of a number of genera, including Magnolia, Daphne, Mahonia, Viburnum and Liquidambar, to name just a few.

In our globalized economy, Mark and some of his other colleagues in the Boskoop area specializing in the propagation and sale of specialty plants found that there was also a growing demand for their product in the U.S. While he initially found this to be an exciting prospect, it is a marketplace that he has since decided to not pursue any further, explaining that, for small companies such as his own, the Phytosanitary regulations involved with overseas shipping was not a realistic undertaking.

“Larger growers and export companies are well set-up to deal with the root washing  requirements and the regulations involved in exporting product to America,” he notes, “but after several attempts, we learned the hard way that we needed to stay focused on our traditional marketplace.”
And, being located in a horticultural Mecca that has easy access to millions of people, a growing number of which call themselves enthusiastic gardeners, this was not a difficult decision to make.