Ten: The Garden Wall and Other Grand Openings
1989
I appreciate the concept of “good taste,” but I don’t have it. I know that while styles are constantly changing, fashion is not haphazard. New colors are annually selected by secret committee; patterns and prints appear magically by the fruit of the loom. One year its wallpaper, or maybe it’s paint. Shag or swag, retro or Deco, sometimes it’s all about Lava Lamps. But my taste is impervious to anything new. I haven’t changed and I won’t change. My feet are rooted in the horticultural clay known as terracotta; I’m stuck on decor made of barn wood or rusty metal. I can’t shake the rustic, earthy thing. Luckily, I have a sister who is the pinnacle of good taste and well ahead of the trends.
As I was noodling out the idea of adding a gift shop, Marilyn was starting an interior design business. She already had clients and a growing reputation. I convinced her to work with me for a year or so to open and manage our new gift shop, The Garden Wall, while she was establishing herself. She agreed.
During the remodel of the chinchilla shed, Marilyn and I went to the January Gift Market in Los Angeles together. Keep in mind, the Gift Market is six months ahead of the seasonal calendar. In other words, going to the market in July is to shop for Christmas and winter goods, and attending the market in January is to buy summer inventory. It’s a little disorienting and entirely overwhelming: a three-day race to see and compare merchandise in hundreds of temporary exhibits and permanent showrooms.
We were shopping for home and garden-related items, which can mean a million different things, so they weren’t grouped in any one building but scattered throughout the show. We walked up and down crowded aisles until our eyes glazed over. We walked the entire market in order not to miss a thing—and then walked it again to place orders. At the end of the day, our feet were flat. And we were starving, having heroically denied ourselves time for lunch. Our notes were a mess. We couldn’t remember what products we liked and where we saw them. It was difficult to track our budget. The only thing we did that seemed easy was spend money.
When we came home, Marilyn went to work finishing the interior of The Garden Wall. She had previously designed the ceiling with rough-hewn beams to hang baskets and wind chimes. The floor was concrete, so with rags, sponges, and knee pads, she daubed a faux moss finish. There were plenty of shelves and cubbyholes to showcase our wares. French doors replaced a slit of an entry, and we decked the roof with a small bell tower. It was adorable!
I spent my time managing the cleanup from the demolition of Phranques Gallery, putting in our first parking lot, and designing and managing the construction of new fencing and a new entry. It was my job to ensure the greenhouses were chock full of healthy houseplants, and our small garden beds were bright with color.
Marilyn and I planned a private Grand Opening for friends and family the night before we opened the shop to the public. Until the very last minute, there were things to be done. I was so worried and anxious I made myself sick—too sick to go to my own Grand Opening.
In the meantime, interior plant sales continued to grow, and the service contracts increased exponentially. I was struggling to keep up. Enter Kathy Harbin. She came on as a plant technician but was quickly managing the other technicians, overseeing installations, and helping control the constant stream of paper work. Our accounts ranged from homes to hospitals, malls and libraries, banks, office buildings, and restaurants. Sometimes the work included planting petunias around a business entry or filling a lobby with Poinsettias. Plants R Us. Kathy helped me organize and streamline the work and ultimately became the General Manager. She is the General Manager of Cactus & Tropicals today.
When Kathy started, we didn’t have a computer. Our account records were kept on 4” x 6” index cards, alphabetized in a blue recipe box. There was nothing high-tech about it. We were operating somewhere between the stone age and the age of plastic.
The first installation large enough to require delivery in a semi-trailer was Salt Lake City’s historic, downtown mall, ZCMl. It was the Grand Opening of a new entrance from South Temple Street and a huge, new food court. The loading dock was in the mall’s underbelly, entered via a down ramp on First South. Halfway down the ramp, the trailer wedged itself between the floor and the ceiling, coming to an abrupt stop. The truck couldn’t move an inch in either direction without ripping an even larger opening in the roof. How many tires does a semi-trailer have, anyway? A million? Air had to be let out of every single one—not to make them flat, but to bring them down an inch or two.
Sales of tall plants, twelve or fourteen feet, were becoming common, and we were installing regardless of weather. We needed a box van for our deliveries, one with an eight-foot interior height and temperature control. A phrase people often use when employing a new tool is to “break it in.” I don’t think this is meant to be literal. While installing plants for the Grand Opening of a new hospital with a beautiful, arched entrance, our driver merrily drove the cab under the arch and BAM, the corners of the box smashed into two points of the portico, eight feet apart. A broken piece of two-by-four and some insulation spilled out. The HVAC system in the box was jolted loose and as it tumbled to the floor, it beheaded a ten-foot Ficus.
In July of 1996, Cactus & Tropicals installed plants in the newly restored Utah Governor’s Mansion. A few years earlier, the mansion had been extensively damaged by a fire caused by faulty wiring on a Christmas tree. Under Governor Michael Leavitt’s guidance, the mansion was returned to its original structure and design of 1902. We installed house plants that were used in that period of history: Kentia Palms, Boston ferns, and Aspidistras. Over the century, the Governor’s Mansion had been remodeled a few times to bring it up to modern standards. This grand opening, probably the fourth, was to celebrate its past.