A Plant Collector's Nursery Tour: 27,000 Taxa!

So can you give me a little bit of history of the nursery, Plant Delights? Sure. Let's actually get inside. Sure. It would be a little bit warmer to chat this morning. I didn't expect it was going to be this cold. No, let's start in here. Okay. Oh yeah, this is what I'm talking about. We have to make sure your thing doesn't fog up. Fog up? Oh, that's right. We're at Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, North Carolina. What makes this nursery different and how did you go about starting it? Because these are plants that I typically wouldn't see in just any old nursery. It came about a long time ago when I was a kid, about five years old, I started buying plants mail order. And I was fascinated with the idea of mail order, that you could be anywhere in the country and get whatever plants that you could not find locally through mail order. So I always had the idea that we wanted to do mail order. And after getting out of school and realizing I didn't know anything about running a nursery, I went to work for the state and learned how to do things like carpentry, plumbing, electricity, all of that. And then after about 16 years, it was like, okay, now it's time to get the nursery started. And we focused on plants that no one else had because to me as a collector, that's what I'm looking for is always something that you can't find somewhere else. So that was the fascination and it's sort of, you know, taken on a life of its own since then. Fascinating though, that you started at five and you were ordering like plants. It's not what a typical five-year-old would do. I mean, did you pick it up from like your parents or your grandparents or what was it about plants in general? It was an odd set of genetics combined with the fact that I'm not a people person. I'm more of a plant person. So for those of us who are introverts and like to be alone, plants provide a great outlet for people like us. And so it was just, you know, my dad gardened a little bit, but he wasn't very good at it. So we constantly fought about, you know, he wanted to, I wanted to throw something out because it wasn't healthy. He wanted to keep it and he was a hoarder. So it was really interesting that I got the genetics, but yet we didn't see eye to eye on how to garden. Right. What year did you start Plant Delights Nursery? The nursery was technically started in 1986 and it was part-time up until 1994 and then we went full-time. And it was always mail order from the get-go? We did. We started out doing mail order because we believe that plants belong to humankind. We think anybody anywhere in the world should be able to have access to any plant as long as it is propagated and not dug out of the wild. So, yeah, that was just important to us that we'd be able to get plants because there's nothing more frustrating than hearing about a plant and then finding out that somebody somewhere else has it and you can't get it. That to me is just the most unkind thing in the world. So our goal is to make every plant that we can possibly grow that has value. Now, we do evaluate it first, make sure it's going to grow well, figure out how to propagate it. But we just think everything should be available to anybody who wants it. And now we're standing in one of your greenhouses. We have a lot of like, it looks like agaves, maybe Haworthias, Haworthiopsis, like all these different kind of succulent varieties. But you have quite an array of plants now. I mean, that dabble across many different families and genera and species. Are these ones that you're growing outdoors here? And like, what zone are we in now? Is this like a Zone 7, 8? What is it? Well, we were 7 up until a few weeks ago. Then we moved into Zone 8. For anybody who doesn't know, the USDA grow map has changed just a couple weeks ago. It has, and it really hasn't changed what we can grow because we've been on a warming trim since the 90s. The last year we had below zero degrees was 1996. Since then, we've been on a gradual, it's an up and down as weather is, but on a warming trend. So, you know, again, some things that we tried back in the early 90s, we will try again. That definitely has changed. Yeah, I'm sure you've kind of like pushed the envelope because this isn't a greenhouse, but can some folks actually grow some of these cold hardy agaves? I know some agaves I think could push to even Zone 5, I think. Absolutely. There are some agaves native in Zone 5. So we're focusing on two things with our agaves. We focus on hardy agaves, number one, and then variegates, which are appealed to collectors. And those aren't hardy because the variegation typically doesn't produce as much sugars. And because of that, they are less winter hardy. Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So those are primarily for house plant collectors and people that use them outside or people in foreign countries that are much warmer. We have a tremendous agave business overseas. So you are actually shipping overseas then. You have phytosanitary certificates that you can send for somebody who is in a completely other country. Yeah, we can ship to any country in the world that's not currently at war with the U.S. We're gaining a lot of warring countries, unfortunately. They come and go. You know, it was interesting. We had a customer in Ukraine this spring that sent us a note that said, where are my plants? I'm desperate for my plants. And we're like, really? That's all you've got on your mind? So plants are incredibly powerful for people. And that's really one of the neat things that social media has done. It's been to connect all these people that grow plants. The agave groups that we're on, they'll have anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 members worldwide. And when you post a new picture, everybody wants it right then. So we have to be inspected. USDA is out here every single week to make sure. And then you have to get, as you said, phytosanitary certificates to send to each country. It's really a lot of trouble. And that's why virtually no nurseries in the U.S. will ship overseas. I'm sure you have a very good inventory here, especially because what we're going to see later, too, is the botanic garden that you have here as well. But how many species do you have? And I know that you collect a lot of cultivars and actually do hybridization yourself here. So give me the numbers. Well, in terms of what we call plant taxa, that's individual different selected plant. We have just over 27,000 in the garden. At any one time, we have 10 percent of those in propagation in the nursery. So it's an insane number. Logistically, it's a nightmare because a typical nursery might have 50, max 100 plants. It's almost impossible to go over that. And then when you get up into the thousands, it's a niche that most people don't want to be in because it's so complicated. What's your plan for this amount of insanity? How is it going to continue forward? Well, that's a great question. And that's something we really had to face several years ago because I'm officially old now, according to the U.S. government. Once you start getting cheap insurance and they start giving you some of your money back, you're now old. Once you get the discount at the grocery store. Then you're officially old. So I've passed that. So we got looking, what will the future look like? Because we want the collections to continue. We want to be able to continue to get plants to people. So several years ago, we gifted the entire property to North Carolina State University. We said, here, here's the botanic garden. Here's the nursery. They said, great. We'd love to have it. We have no money. So we're going to set you up an endowment and we're going to give you a hat that says fundraiser. And your job is to convince people that this is worth preserving and to put money in the endowment. So we've been raising money for that now. Not anything we can touch until the university officially takes over. Until then, we have to continue to run the nursery. But what will happen once we transition, we started a membership program this year. And we will get to the point when we transition that we will only ship orders to members of the garden. Oh, that's interesting. What an interesting proposition. I love asking these questions because there's a lot of creativity that could come out of it. And sometimes we think about these things when it's a little too late, you know. So it's very interesting to hear that that's how it's going to work and that the membership affords you the opportunity to have plants shipped. Excellent idea. It's all about sustainability. I know that's the popular word now. But we said because nobody's going to come in with the same weird genetics I have or is willing to work for as cheap as I am for as many hours. So we had to be realistic and say, how can we make that model sustainable? And that's what we feel like will work. Yeah. Well, take us through some of these plants. Just show us, you know, a select few varieties so that people can get a real sense of what you have here as far as genetics go. Well, a lot of these are things that we created. So a good example would be here's a couple here. This is an agave. These are actually mangaves. Oh, yeah. So you used two different Manfredia and agave together. Yes. So it's two different genera together. So it's hybridized the two. Now, what's interesting about a lot of these, both agaves and mangaves, is many of them never offset. And agaves are what we call monocarpic. They flower. They live their entire life to flower at one time, and then they fall over dead. So it's a little difficult to propagate something that never offsets. Right. So we came up with a technique where we take a drill bit and we drill right down through the center of the plant. And when we do that, it basically tells the plant you have no more hormones called auxins controlling the buds at the base of each leaf. And all of a sudden, once we destroy its spinal cord, it begins to offset. So these are offsets that you would normally never see in an intergeneric cross. With any kind of agave or mangave. And so this one, for example, started... That's crazy. How did you... Was that like an accident? Or was that like, hey, what happens if we take a drill and do it? You know what I mean? Well, it was like we spent a lot of money on some of these plants and we're like, we've got to get our money back. So how do we do that? Yeah. Well, we started peeling the leaves back and we said, oh, look, there's a bud at the base of each leaf. Yeah. But it never grows. Why? There's only one reason. Auxins are telling it not to grow. Right. So we said if we could stop the auxin flow. And so we just basically... We tried a couple of ways. We took knives. We do what we call cross cutting. Cut it in four sections. And then we tried drilling. And it was just really experiments using the basics knowledge of horticulture. Yeah. And it turned out it works absolutely fabulous. I guess it's kind of funny because it's just like you don't think about mutilating your plants like that initially. You know, unless you're kind of really in the weeds, so to speak. But it does make me wonder because I see some of those intergeneric crosses like gasteria and aloe, like gastro aloes. And a lot of those they'll say like, hey, it won't promote it. There's maybe the seed is not viable or doesn't produce seed or whatever it is. But you're just getting the offsets, which is essentially then the clone of that mother plant, which is now an intergeneric plant. If you didn't do the drill, would it ever produce a flower spike? And are those seeds viable? It would produce a flower. Anytime you do a bi-generic, sterility is going to be greatly reduced. It would be like crossing a human with a chimpanzee and expecting it to have viable offspring. Yeah. Probably not. And if they did, they probably would be pretty ugly. Yeah. So, so typically now, not saying that can never happen because we do have a few bi-generics that actually do set seed, but they are highly infertile. I see. Yeah. And the other interesting thing we've been able to do is to stabilize plants. So, for example, this one, this when we first found this, this was a found as a sport. And it only had one little yellow piece and one little yellow piece there. So what we're trying to do is isolate each of these buds and see which of those buds has a double wide edge. So we would drill. And then eventually, after four or five years, we wind up with a stabilized form. Right. With a solid edge. So this would have been where it started, was just one little piece. And after, like I say, four or five years of drill, grow, drill, grow, we get it isolated into something that's genetically stable. Got it. And now we can drill that and those will be identical. Exactly. And we throw these away. So it's a long process, many times, to get what looks to somebody. They don't realize it has taken five, sometimes ten years to go from that initial sport to something that's commercial. And then even, this is a more cold hardy variety, right? It is. Do you specialize in everything that could be outdoors here or do you have things that are even pushing the boundary here? The only thing that we have that would not be hardy here are the variegated agaves and mangaves. Everything else we do has to be hardy. Okay. Just as a collector, that's one of the things I couldn't turn down. Right. We typically, for houseplants, we try to stay out of that. So should we, do you want to go show some other ones? Or do we want to go to a different greenhouse and see other varieties? I mean, these are extremely variegated. I mean, look at these colors. It's like a cucumber color, you know? Yeah, this is one we name mostly ghostly. Mostly ghostly. Because in the spring, I mean, in the summer, it's just almost pure white. Wow, look at that. And what's interesting, it has chlorophyll in the leaf, but it has the white overlay. Right. So it still has vigor. Right. So the cellular layers below are actually quite green. But the ones above are just kind of making it a little shallower colored. Exactly. They're stacked. It's really a neat technique. And we find sometimes when the layers are stacked, as opposed to beside each other, that we actually don't lose winter hardiness. So we have one really interesting one that comes out beautifully variegated all summer. But before winter, it goes back to all blue. And therefore, it doesn't lose any winter hardiness. Unbelievable, huh? So it's all about sugar production. It's another stunning one. Yeah, look at this. So this is sort of an interesting thing we found in the mangoves, is that the purple all comes from the Manfreda parent. And it normally comes as speckling. But what happened here, the patterns, the speckling, isolated into an edge. Right. We've never seen that happen. This is very weird. It's almost like a designer plant. It is. I mean, it's unbelievable. And the color on it. The thing is, you just never know what you're going to get. So this was a sport off of something that was an intergeneric cross? Yes, correct. Okay. And then you just select for this over and over and over again through your drill technique or however it is. Absolutely. This was found by a friend of ours, Hans Hansen, who's a breeder we work closely with. And this started out with purple spots. And I probably have, let's see if I've got the original here. Probably, it wasn't this one, but it was very similar to this. And those spots just decided on their own to migrate to the edge. I mean, what a winner. Yeah, just when you think you understand plants, they do something that you've never seen before. Well, that was interesting. Thank you for. Yeah. Well, now some plants will obviously have like an edge of, like I'm even thinking some philodendrons, they sometimes have that edge of pink or red around the edge. Is there a benefit to that? Do we know any kind of understanding? Do we have any other understandings of why like some of those anthocyanins or whatever color is happening in those plants are going to the edge? Maybe because chlorophyll is too costly and it doesn't need to be on the edge of a leaf? In this case, we don't know. There has to be a reason. Something happened in the plant that it felt like there was a need. There's always a need. We just don't always know what it is. Now, some plants may mutate to something that's not advantageous. And generally in the wild, they would die out. So if you had a green plant that mutated, variegated in the wild, that's going to be selected against because it's going to be either less vigorous, it's going to be more prone to something else, it's going to be less attractive to insects. And so those mutants in the wild will eventually die out. They're not going to continue. It's weird because that's a lot of the stuff that people like. And so we select for it. But we do that in the human population, too. We do. We do. So, you know, it's just kind of a weird thing. Now, just out of curiosity, another 30,000-foot approach, I mean, obviously you've had your eyes on plants for quite some time now. And how do you go about collecting? I'm sure you have these collector's networks. You're always looking for new stuff. A lot of our plants actually start in the wild, obviously. So what's your process? Well, we've done 100 trips worldwide collecting. So we started back in the mid-'90s. We've been to a lot of countries. We've done a lot of trips right here in the U.S. There's still new species to be found every day. We've published several new species. We've got a lot more in the garden right now. I mean, new species within a couple hours of here. They're just sitting there. So it's just a matter of getting out, finding those plants, and bringing them back. And when you've grown as many as we have, you pretty much, when you see something, you know it's a new species. And that's pretty cool. What are some of the favorite places that you like to actually go see plants? Oh, my goodness. They're all great. I mean, every place is so unique. I mean, I'm just as happy to go a mile down the road and go out in the woods as I am to go to the other side of the world. So, you know, we write up all of our foreign trips online on our website, jlbg.org. So people, if they want to see what it's like, we do a daily diary with photos, and you can sort of get an idea of, yeah, I'd like to do that, or, oh, my gosh, I will never want to do that again after reading what it's like. Well, I mean, obviously cultivars are a big thing here. Talk about, like, the importance of maybe even, or if this is something that you do or focus on, the importance of actually providing plants and propagating plants from a conservation perspective as well. Because, like, a lot of the plants might be maybe not in the wild as much anymore, but actually propagating them and spreading the wealth out there could have a role. Yeah, we have evolved through the years. We started out initially just to collect plants, and then once we started traveling, realized that plants are endangered all over the world. Current numbers, 36.5% of the world's flora is endangered or threatened. That's over 100,000 plants, and that's not even counting the ones that haven't been discovered yet. So we really switched our focus to become more of an ex-situ plant conservation garden. We think conserving plants in the wild themselves only is not the best approach because the climate is changing. It's fascinating how you've got a lot of people who still believe it's all about, we must preserve them in the wild, we must not propagate them off-site, and that makes no sense because plants are going extinct at this alarming rate. So we believe in gathering propagation material from the wild and propagating it. And for us, the rarer a plant is, the more critical it is that we propagate. We're sort of at odds with some of the other ex-situ conservation gardens because there are a few that propagate, but then they won't share. They believe that the rarer a plant is, you should keep it out of the hands of the unclean masses. It's only up to academia to hold onto that and study that, but they should never go to normal people. And we believe the opposite. We believe that everybody should have a role in plant conservation. Yeah, we've had some really interesting stories from botanic gardens, some botanic gardens who share it out to the unclean masses, as you had said, and they were grateful that they did because a hurricane comes through or this or that and the plants are wrecked, and they're like, we don't have any more of that variety. But then because they had shared it to other people in their places, they actually had that. Or another great example is when we went to Thailand and they were mass propagating a lot of cycads, which, you know, cycas is obviously, and all the adjoining genera are highly endangered. And they were able to get these plants out, propagate them into landscape plants so that people would stop trading them at such a kind of crazy level. So there's a lot of great examples out there that when you combine, you know, kind of this commercial-based approach with this conservation-based, it's like consumer-powered conservation to a certain extent. Exactly. It is, but yet that's still a very small minority of the conservation gardens that believe in sharing. They really have got lawyers involved now. And if you want things from the majority of gardens in the U.S., you have to sign papers that you will never share them. And that is the antithesis of what we need to be doing. Well, show us some more. Should we go and see other things other than the agave? Just because people will be like, that's an agave nursery. Absolutely. And you're more than that. Yeah, yeah. What might be some of the reasons that these gardens are not willing to share? Well, okay, a couple reasons. Yeah. One, they believe that there is a magic, perfect time in the history of the world that should always be preserved forever. They believe nature is static. And the fact is, nature is not static, never has been static. So that's one. The other is, they get lots of grant money to go study rare plants in the wild. And they're afraid that if plants get propagated and spread around and commercialized, they won't be able to get the grant money. So, as with so many things, follow money. So, let's see. Let's walk into one of our research houses up here. So, this is one of our research houses. So, these are all pitcher plants. Oh, wow. I mean, excuse me, not pitcher, I mean jack-in-the-pulpit, sorry. But it's still cool. Look how they start out. You wouldn't think that they're like, you know. Exactly. There's virtually no one growing jack-in-the-pulpits for sale from seed. Yeah, and you have not just a species, you have lots of different types of pulpits from all over. We do, we do, absolutely. And that's what I love about your thing, because it's like shopping in a, it's like a kid going to a candy store, quite literally, and you're like, oh my god, I want the Swedish Fresh, I want this and that. But, like, you have an array of plants, like, within that taxa or group. Yeah, I mean, again, commercial nurseries are going to, they want to go out and call the wholesaler, and I want this, so many of this, so many of this, so many of this. It takes much more work to do, to bring the plant in, trial the plant, then figure out how to propagate it, then figure out, then get the photographs, and then write a description of something that nobody's ever described before. So, yeah, it's much easier. So this is, again, no sane person would try something this complicated. Look how beautiful this is, the structure of this. Isn't this cool? It's so architectural. This is a mangavi called Praying Hands. Praying Hands, oh, it is just so gorgeous. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. Yeah. So this is where all the seed arrays, so these, and these would be transplanted, grown off, once we have something we feel like we can do from seed. Most of our stuff is clonal, but a few things come true from seed. Look at these little bulbles, like what are these officially called? These are seed of spider lilies. Oh, wow, look at that. This is the genus Hymenocallis. This is not hardy to our zone, unfortunately. There are some Hymenocallis, it would be fine. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, not this one, though? Let's see, this is Oxentalis. Oxentalis, yes, that actually would be hardy for you. That actually would. So this is sort of, this is where we, the first time we have one of something, in terms of agave, this is where we mutilate it. We call this our 50 Shades of Grey bench. This is our torture bench. 50 Shades of Grey torture bench. So you can see, we've just basically cut the centers out. Wow, unbelievable. And we're waiting for them to do. This is so mind-blowing to me. So most everything here is a one-of-a-kind, the only one that exists in the world. So you're having a leap of faith to take a drill to the only plant that exists in the world. Yeah, I mean, tell me about it. When you're drilling, do you have like a 100% result? Like, because after you've tried it so many times, like, is it 90%? Is it like 75%? Because you're throwing your hat to the wind, like you said. We're pretty much at 100%, maybe 99%. As long as you wait until it's big enough. If you drill it too small, yes, you just killed it. Right. It just doesn't have enough mass. So we have to wait. And what we will do is I will wait until something is ready. And then I'll put a tag in it. And this tells our drilling crew that it's safe to come in and drill it at that size. So now here you have a floral stalk coming out. Yes, correct. Would you have to cut this off first and then drill into it if you were to do that with this one? Yes. When we flagged this, it wasn't flowering. Can you eat this? It's just like an asparagus. It's in the asparagus family. Have you ever tried eating it? I have not. Personally, I have not been hungry enough to try one. But in theory, it should work. I know. Because when I see those really big agave, and it's about to bloom, but it just still looks like a giant asparagus, I'm like, that could feed a family of 100. It could. Absolutely. But I thought you'd find this interesting. Yeah, absolutely. So here we've taken a lot off already. And so it's finally petering out. Those will be the last ones to come off of that. But we've been taking them off that for almost a year. That's crazy. So that becomes your mother plant. You see one here kind of in the process of just having these. Exactly. I have never seen this technique before. I think this will be mind-blowing for most people. Yeah, it's pretty neat. It allows you to kind of experiment. And I think everybody feels like a lot of their plants are so precious, especially because you might have one of or two of. So having to go and do that experimentation, it doesn't cross many people's minds. We've had a couple of collectors that had a one-off, and they could not do it. They didn't have the stomach to do this. So they sent the plant to us, and we drilled it for them. And then two years later, we send them back their plants. Amazing. That's crazy. Do the plants fully recover after you drill it once? No, once you drill it, you toss it away. So once that finishes and once I get every single bud off that, we will throw the parent away. It just has no value at that point. How many pups can you get off of it initially? It probably depends on the size. Typically, you get one per leaf. Okay, got it. So everywhere there's a leaf. But if you take them off early enough, you can actually get a new bud to form at the base, and then you can double the leaves. Right. Okay, that's cool. Look at this one. This one's exquisite too. Yes, yes. And this is as slow as it gets because it has so little chlorophyll, it's just painfully slow to grow. This is one we've been trying to get up enough to offer for probably 20 years now, and we have yet to get there. What do you do with something like this where it's like this rosette shape? So this type of agave, this is agave istamensis, this one you have to get in and just take a knife. We use what we call a ginsu knife. They sell them on late night TV for cooking because you can never dull them. We take it and just slice right down through the middle and then start popping them off. Your main plant is destroyed. Yeah. So you can't get too precious about it, I guess, because you can be like, that's such a beautiful form. It is. It's like a cauliflower, but then you're like... And if your goal is to keep it for yourself, that's great. But if your goal is to share it with others, you have to go in and sacrifice this beautiful plant. Right. This looks powdery. Yeah, so this is one we're going to have to go in at some point and cut this. It needs to get a little bit bigger. I'm not comfortable with it being big enough yet. Now, will these produce viable offsets even though it's like the chlorophyll is very low in it? Yeah, it still will. As long as it has a leaf on it, it has a bud there. Wow. This one right beside it, this will give you an example. This is one that's going to have to be cut soon. This, if you ever find it online for sale, is going to run anywhere between $10,000 and $12,000 a plant. Wow. Agave utahensis. Variation utahensis. That's just beyond rare. So I've got to let it get just a little larger, and then we're going to go in and hope it's not in that 1% that we lose. This is so funny because it looks like one of those variegated spider plants. It does, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Isn't that cool? But it's like a really curly, cute, and what is it? Just an agave oca huata snow glue. Oh, that's a different one. This is the— Oh, this one. Now, this is an interesting plant. Paleoagave bracteosa. This was an agave up until two weeks ago, and a paper published said, hey, these three agaves that we thought were agaves, we've done DNA, and they're not actually agaves. Interesting. So it became a new genus called a paleoagave. Now, do they call it a paleoagave because it was before the agave? Yes. Like the taxonomic tree? Yes, yes. It came out early on, like 6.1 million years ago. It was the first thing to evolve into what then later became agaves. Well, what's interesting, though, is it's kind of like the moss. It always stayed moss. But, like, you know, this one decided to stay as is, and then his agave brothers and sisters went forth. They went off and evolved in different ways, which often happens. So where do these come from? Where do they hail from? This particular species is from the hills around Monterrey, Mexico. Okay. We actually—I've seen this one in the wild. About 8,000 feet up, it hangs off the cliffs. Wow. And it's really—it's one of the few agaves that has no spines. Yeah. Are there any specific, like, groups that you feel like plant— I mean, obviously agave seems like something that you specialize in, but are there particular groups that you feel like we are, like, masters in or we really specialize in? Quite a few, actually. And what was interesting is they've been reorganizing the plant families. Almost everything we specialize in got moved into the asparagus family. So agaves, hostas, Solomon's seal, asparagus, all these, everything kept being moved into asparagaceae. And we're like, well, that's pretty cool, so I guess that's our number one family now. Yeah. I'm tempted to, like, want to eat an agave now because even hostas, hostas they collect in Japan for their food. They're edible. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. So I have no doubt they would be edible. Tasty is another thing. Yeah, that's the other thing. I would put it out and see if the deer eat it. And if the deer lips wrap around it and they don't keel over, then maybe I'll try it. That's probably good. Okay. All right. Well, let's go into another house. Okay. I just thought you'd find this interesting. Yeah, this is fantastic. Look at these amorphophallus right here. This is amorphophallus. This is titanium. This is the giant one. Yeah. That has flowered twice for us. We've sold over 1,100 of those, probably more than, I guess, any other nursery around. Unreal. And when they flower, the flower is just beyond crazy. We used to have a huge amorphophallus collection, but just because of time we gave away all the tropicals except for these few. Got it. And focused on the hardy stuff now. This is our staging house, so everything that's getting ready to be shipped is staged in here. So the orders are— Hello. Hi, hi. The orders are pulled in here, so we're just getting ready to start our busy shipping season as the weather warms. And so this house will be wall-to-wall with orders. Yeah. And how do you go about— I mean, I feel sorry for the folks who have to kind of pull the plants. You know what I mean? You'd be like, what house was that in? I mean, you must get good after it after a while. Well, we have a new shipping team mostly each year, so you've just joined us. So you're saying there's high turnover. Well, yes. Sometimes we'll get lucky and have somebody come back for five, seven years, but this year I think we've got mostly new folks coming in, and they're just learning the process. Right. So these—and then we ship everything out of this— everything goes out of this one garage. Okay. So every single plant that leaves the property ever has gone out of this one little building. So we really are a very small boutique nursery because typically— There seems to be a lot of people here, though, you know, for— There's a lot of people. It takes a lot to run something this complex. Yeah. This is—so everything that's going out, this is how the order's processed. Yeah. So they're pulled, brought in here, and this is our shipping team, and they're making sure everything is packed right so the dirt won't fall out, so the plants will be alive, so the moisture's right. Right. And, like, if I'm in the Zone 5 now, you wouldn't be shipping to me quite yet. No, unless you had a special request and you were willing to sign and say, Hey, I realize there's a risk shipping to Zone 5 right now. Right. But I want to do it anyway. We used to have that with Martha's folks. They would be wanting to ship a segment—I mean, shoot a segment. We're like, We can't ship to you. You're too cold. No, we'll risk it. Yeah. And we'd have to put heat packs in there. Heat packs in it, yeah, which is common now. Ship it up to things like that, but we prefer not to do that. Right, right. I mean, it just—I look at it, I'm like, it's— Example of those agaves, it takes forever for that thing to grow into any type of size. Yeah, yeah, and we really care about the plants, so we don't want you to be killing your plants. That's our preference. Yeah. All right, let's go in one more house. Sure. Look at the epimediums. I know. It's like their time at this moment. You saw some of the yellow guys under there. Oh, my God, they're just so amazing. So this is one of our sun houses, so these are all the plants that will be pulled. So we go through down below where they're actually grown, and we make sure we're getting only the best that's ready to go, and those get pulled up here. And this is really helpful. You have all the care and the photos and everything, so— Yeah, this helps our pullers to learn the plants. Yeah. And then when we open up to the public, we do two open houses four times a year. So each season, we do two weekends. The public gets to come in the same house. Oh, right. And so it's already set up for them. So they get to pull the plants, too, then. They get to pull themselves. If you come here and open house, you get to pull whatever plant you want. My goodness, if I lived down here, we would be in trouble. We would be in trouble. You wouldn't believe the people that come from the Rochester area down here for open houses. Yeah. I mean, I would tell my dad, I'm like, get that CDL license ready, Dad. Yeah, yeah. It's really—we've got one gentleman that drives up every year from Mississippi for open house. Every single open house. He'll drive up and he drives right back. Oh, my goodness. And so it really is a neat opportunity for people. See, I think of this as a customer. If I was a kid and I had the opportunity to go to my favorite mail order and pick out plants, oh, my God. Yeah. So it's about, you know, fulfilling that desire that I had. There was no place that allowed me to do that. Tony has a five-year-old, his five-year-old spirit, like right in here. Yes, absolutely. I mean, that's how he's approaching this whole thing as his five-year-old self. Without question. I mean, it's—yeah, I know what got me excited. And see, this is why we don't ship things out of coolers like most mail orders do. Right. Because when you get a bag with roots and a cooler, how exciting is that? Yeah. I just—to me, you are ordering yourself a Christmas present. Yeah. And when you get it, I want you to pull this out and say, wow, I'm excited. That opening of the box, there's nothing like that. And when you are excited and you open and you find a bunch of stuff that's in a bag, it's like, really? Yeah. That just doesn't have the same level of excitement. Well, I always find it interesting because when I go to your site and I'm shopping on Plant Delights Nursery, I'm—you know, you're in your zone, and sometimes you'll have a note, maybe zone—hardy to zone six, maybe hardy to zone five or whatever. Yeah. And I'm like, I want to try it because I'm also the type of person who I'm like, let's just give it a whirl. And sometimes we don't know, but we have to be honest. When you're offering something that's never been offered before, you don't know how hardy it is. We're going to give you our best guess, but we're not going to make up something. I've ordered from enough nurseries. I think they have a stamp that says zone three to nine, and they just stamp it on every plant. And realistically, there's not many plants that are zone three to nine. So, yeah, we try to be very particular and say, yes, this—and many times we'll upgrade over the years when people call us, and we'll often get calls. And, you know, you've got this as zone seven. Well, I'm in zone five. Okay, question. What is the coldest temperature you recorded without snow cover? And if they say zero, I say, well, sorry, that's a zone seven temperature. But if they say minus 20 and we had no snow cover, then, yeah, let's change the zone. Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much for this tour. This is just absolutely phenomenal. I just want to shake your hand. Oh, bless you. You know, for somebody who, you know, just loves plants as well and loves getting interesting and new varieties, this is just—I feel like a kid in a candy store, just as you said. That's what we love. Thank you. If you'd like to see how Tony has planted up and designed the landscape around the nursery, then you must see our tour with him on the 28-acre juniper-level botanical gardens, which will be on our sister channel, Flock Finger Lakes. In the meantime, if you're liking the videos we produce, then take a moment to like, subscribe, and hit the notifications button. A little bit of your effort really helps us grow and allows other plant lovers and future plant lovers to find our content. See you here in the next video and on Flock.