Store Front as it appeared in the 1970’s |
The Early Years At
Johannsen’s |
| It happens all the time. A customer comes
into the store, looks around wistfully, and says, "I remember when you had
Laddie." Or, while waving in the direction of our ceramic pottery, another may say,
"Remember when you had the fish over there?" Still others, often silver haired
and of a "certain age," remember coming in as children and romping with the
greenhouse kittens. |
...pallets of lawn fertilizer and bins of grass seed once greeted customers, giving the
store the air of a farmer’s coop. |
Ah for the good old days. Those of us who are newer to the staff can only wish we had
known Laddie the Wonder Dog, or Thomas the cat. We have to stretch our imaginations to
envision tropical fish for sale in one corner, and a litter of kittens on the front
checkout counter. And you’d have a hard time convincing us on a busy Saturday in May
that back in the ‘60s one or two people often ran the place on a spring Saturday.
Today it takes nearly thirty of us to do the same thing.
The old photographs tell the stories. Where
the farm once stood, workers pieced together remnants of an old greenhouse they had hauled
to Madison from Watertown. Trees and shrubs, some wrapped in burlap and others potted,
stood in front of the store waiting to be purchased. It’s been twenty years since we
sold nursery stock, which was eliminated to make room for a burgeoning perennial
department. Difficult though it is to believe, we carried less than 100 varieties of
perennials in the early days; today we have over 1,000 varieties.
|
Where fountains, statuary,
and wall plaques grace our front entrance today, pallets of lawn fertilizer stacked to the
ceiling and bins of grass seed once greeted customers, giving the store the air of a
farmer’s coop. Back then we seeded tomatoes, petunias, and all the common summer
annuals and vegetables directly into wooden flats. If you wanted to buy a tomato plant we
simply cut one from the flat with a paint scraper, rolled it in newspaper, and handed it
to you. Today you go home with a plastic market pac, an innovation that boosted the
gardening industry but added to our overflowing landfills.
These days we’re lucky to have the
"old timers" working and shopping here to remind us of where we came from. We
still have our greenhouse dogs, of course, and they tell us that Laddie’s spirit
continues to frolic in the old greenhouse. |
|
