Planning Plant Purchases

Visit almost any nursery show or plant material supplier these days and you’re likely to hear the same story – plant availability is down from previous years and quality material is of premium value.

But a landscape contractor without quality plant material is like an artist without paint, so contractors do what is necessary to guarantee the availability of the material they need to do their work. In a 1999 survey of Lawn & Landscape readers, better than 77 percent of respondents indicated they purchased plant materials in 1999, and respondents also predicted they will spend in excess of $104,000 on plant material purchases in 2000. (Surprisingly, respondents in the Northeast and West predicted they will spend approximately twice as much as respondents in the Midwest and nearly four times as much as respondents located in the South.)

With the challenges of finding quality material still confronting so many contractors (and expected by many nursery growers to continue through most of next year), the process contractors use to find and acquire plants becomes even more important.

RELATIONSHIPS RULE. Not surprisingly, contractors spoke at length about the importance of developing and maintaining quality relationships with plant suppliers and keeping the number of primary plant suppliers a company deals with to a minimum.

“We work with a few, specific vendors who know what type of company we are and understand our plant material needs,” noted Bruce Allentuck, president, Al-lentuck Landscaping, Gaithersburg, Md. “As a matter of fact, we work with one wholesaler even though it is not the closest one to our office, but our relationship works real well because we’re both committed to helping the other one succeed.

"We’ll also use a local wholesale yard occasionally for emergency needs," Allentuck continued. "The quality is generally pretty good, but the prices are higher."

"We deal primarily with suppliers that are located within 90 minutes of our office," commented Booth Hemingway, president/owner, Piscataqua Landscaping Co., Eliot, Maine. "The quality, variety and size of the materials these growers stock is what matters to me, so I only want to deal with growers that I know will have a wide range of plants from generic rhododendrons, maples and oaks up to 7-inch caliper specimens and other unique plants that I know will work in our area."

Hemingway noted that he even used to buy perennials wholesale and then pot the plants to guarantee always having an adequate supply, but that will change next year because his suppliers have proven they are able to keep up with the plant demand.

Some contractors admitted that the lure of cheaper prices has drawn them out of a successful relationship with a plant supplier, only to end up making the contractor look bad to a client or making the installation process more difficult.

"We had a primary supplier we dealt with, and then we started thinking we could use another supplier that offered lower prices," recalled Chris DeWitt, president, Signature Lawn and Landscape, Easley, S.C. "We ended up going back to our primary supplier because we got burned by the other company, and now we’ll only use other suppliers when there is a significant price savings. Otherwise, you just can’t run the risk of selling a job with 17 3-gallon hydrangeas only to get to the nursery or have the plants delivered and they are the wrong size."

Mike McClellan, project manager for Blue Spruce Landscape, San Jose, Calif., explained that sending a list of his plant needs for a job out to two primary growers generally fills about 65 percent of those needs.

"Filling out the rest of the order requires checking through our plant purchasing history to see who we’ve bought specific materials from in the past," McClellan related.

"A lot of design/build companies seem focused on getting in and out of the job as soon as possible so they look to buy plants that are always stocked in a nursery," added McClellan. "That really limits the plant palate available to them, so they end up with a lot of jobs that look the same and they’re rarely able to ‘Wow’ their customers."

THE TRICK OF TIMING. Deciding whom to purchase plant material from is one challenge, but once that dilemma is solved contractors still have to decide when to purchase the plants, and different contractors have different philosophies here.

"We haven’t gotten into having the sup-pliers deliver the plants directly to the job yet, although I don’t have a good reason why," DeWitt commented. "We’re just more comfortable having the plant material on our property and knowing that we’ve got the right plants before we show up on the job. We’ve ended up with the wrong materials too many times because of a grower’s mistakes."

There certainly are benefits to developing a nursery holding area, and having confidence that you have the right plant materials is one of them. Contractors with holding yards also enjoy greater flexibility in that they have a number of plants available to them immediately if an unexpected need or situation arises on a job.

But the added challenges of finding space to keep a holding yard, keeping the plants irrigated and fertilized, and paying maintenance personnel to prune these plants or inspect them for insect infestations as necessary is enough to convince many contractors that holding yards aren’t worth the hassle.

"We’ve tried to really cut down on the amount of material we keep in our yard," acknowledged McClellan, adding that using employees to care for these plants would boost some crews’ indirect time and delay them from getting started each morning. "Keeping the plants looking good requires a lot of effort, so we go for just-in-time delivery to our yard so we don’t actually have to maintain the plants or we have them dropped off at the job site."

"We moved to our current site – an indoor warehouse – from a retail nursery that we could stock and pull plant materials from," related Allentuck. "This move required some changing on our part, but we’ve become more efficient as a result and more aware that we have to have a specific use for a plant before we buy it. We used to take plant availability for granted, which led to more waste."

"We start buying plants as soon as we have a signed contract for a job," asserted Hemingway. "We use the customer’s deposit money to offset our plant costs."

Hemingway said he prefers to tag all plant material himself because of his familiarity with the specific use for each plant and his sensitivity to a client’s expectations, but time constraints necessitate that he fax some orders to suppliers and trust them to tag quality material for him.

"Our key suppliers will generally hold tagged material for us for 30 days before they start charging us to keep the plants in their yard," Hemingway added.

McClellan also pointed out the importance of having experienced personnel in the field to take receipt of the plant deliveries that go directly to a job so that contractors aren’t accepting plants that aren’t healthy or aren’t what was ordered.

"We make sure our people in the field can discern whether or not we’ll take a plant before it even comes off the truck," he remarked. "If a supplier sends us inferior material, we’ll reject it and never let it off the truck so that job is done properly and so that supplier knows to only send us quality plant material."

McClellan said suppliers are generally receptive to replacing rejected plant materials in an order at no cost, although some suppliers have certain restrictions about when they’ll take plant materials back.

"Normally, a supplier is looking for a long-term partnership with us as well, so they understand the importance of supplying exactly what we need," he said. "But we are seeing some nurseries becoming sensitive to infestations like fire ants so they have policies against plant material returning to their yard from a job site, which makes it even more imperative that your employees on the site pay attention before the materials are even unloaded from the delivery truck."

The exception to the ‘No Holding Yard’ rule seems to be when unique varieties or the most commonly used varieties are considered.

"Having some basic materials on our property is reassuring in case an unexpected need arises," observed Hemingway, who added that limited availability of some of his personal favorites has led him to acquire them whenever they were available because he knows he would use them soon. "We keep about an 8,000-square-foot holding yard packed with some basic plants all summer. I wish we had the time to track when they came into the holding yard so we could make sure the older varieties were going out to jobs first, but that’s not possible right now."

"Sometimes we’ll come across a plant that we know we’ll need more of in the future, so we may buy it and hold it for a month or two," agreed McClellan.

The author is Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine.

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