Johnson's Legacy Landscapes, nurtured for the past year as a division of Johnson's Garden Centers in Wichita, Kan., is now an independent business.
Legacy Landscapes, owned by Linden and Angie Johnson, officially became its own corporation recently. It separated from Johnson's Garden Centers, which continues to operate three retail locations.
Legacy Landscapes will be based at the Johnson's Ridge Road location. The Garden Centers will rent retail space from Legacy at that location.
Marty Johnson, who owns the Garden Centers with his wife, Nancy, and son Jeremy, described the corporate split in gardening language: There was a need to divide and transplant the divisions to give both room to grow and thrive.
"We expect to see the retail side grow with the introduction of new plant materials and new services," Marty Johnson said. "Jeremy is our expert on what's new in the plant world."
Legacy Landscapes will focus on providing wholesale services and materials to area landscape contractors.
"We won't be doing complete landscape jobs from the retail centers any more," Johnson said.
"If a customer comes in and buys shrubs or a tree and wants us to install that, we will still do that. But if someone has a new house or a new lawn and wants a landscape design and installation, we'll refer them to the new company."
Marty and Nancy Johnson traded their stock in Legacy Landscapes to Linden and Angie Johnson in exchange for their shares of stock in the Garden Centers to make the transaction happen. Marty and Linden Johnson are brothers.
Johnson's has a longtime presence in Wichita and was around in the infancy of the nursery industry in Kansas.
Johnson's was founded by Marty and Linden's grandfather, Orie, and father, Harold.
"My brothers and I grew up in the store on West 13th Street," Marty Johnson said.
Another of the Johnson brothers, Wes, lives in Hesston where he operates a wholesale growing operation and sells bedding plants and other seasonal plants to the Garden Centers.
"We're all in the gardening business, and we're all looking forward to growth in the years ahead," Marty Johnson said.
