February 2022 - 8

perspectives
BY SHELBY JACKSON
Plant Sales in the Time of COVID
While COVID-19 raged and folks were quarantined at home,
the world around us changed quickly. Gone were the days of
going out for meals, casual shopping and visiting with friends
face to face. Many of us quickly said hello to months stuck at
home with our fur babies and families. All of a sudden,
Zoom meetings were the only way we communicated
with work and school colleagues, online shopping and
food delivery became our desired choice for grocery
shopping and retail therapy, and we found ourselves
with time to fill that would normally have been filled
with more social connections being surrounded
by people.
What did we do to fill
Shelby Jackson is
co-owner of Carolina
Native Nursery
and a member of
GPN's 40 Under 40
Class of 2018. She
can be reached at
shelby@carolinanativenursery.com.
that
time? We learned
to crochet, we painted,
we made TikTok
videos, we cooked (oh
goodness, did we cook.
Anyone need some
sourdough starter?), watched
everything available on Netflix,
just to name a few ...
And we gardened.
We turned our backyards
We wanted to
make sure everybody
had access to high
into havens of blossoms and
vegetables. We sowed seeds and
planted containers of herbs and
flowers. We spent the money we planned to spend on that trip to
Italy on our landscapes and our landscapes flourished.
We also spent more time online. We read books, newspapers,
magazines and online articles. We garnered a newfound love of
nature, wildlife and plants. We took interest in books specifically
about gardening and the ecosystem. We followed our local
Audubon chapter on Instagram. We fed the birds. We learned
about native plants and how they help our local ecosystem by
providing food for our bird populations and habitat for small
mammals, and we discouraged the continued spread of nonnative,
invasive species. As much as general gardening took off in the age
of COVID, I firmly believe that the native plant trend rose by leaps
and bounds.
A MAJOR GROWTH SPURT
As a small business owner of a native plant nursery in western
North Carolina, we saw our sales rise exponentially in 2020 and
2021. Local retail garden centers and landscapers also spoke of
having the best year they've ever had.
Carolina Native Nursery deals mostly with wholesale clients all
over the East Coast. We sell to retail garden centers, landscapers,
landscape architects and re-wholesalers. We specialize in growing
8 FEBRUARY 2022 GPNMAG.COM
quality straight species
native perennials
and shrubs.
straight species native plants and native Azaleas, Kalmia and
Rhododendron from seed. At our inception in 2003, although we
were a wholesale-only nursery, if we had a retail customer show
up to buy plants out of our two greenhouses (one of which being
a propagation house) we would kindly help them out, mark up the
price of the plants a little bit, load up their vehicles and send them
on their way.
It is often hard to find straight species natives at garden centers
and we wanted to make sure everybody had access to highquality
straight species native perennials and shrubs for their
landscapes, so we didn't mind when a retail customer strolled
in. It wasn't until 2017 that we
realized that we were leaving a
ton of money on the table by not
offering retail clients a place to
come get their native plants.
At that point, we built tables,
made signage and hauled a
handful of every species of plant
we grow to one central area and
opened our " Bee Native Plant
Shop. " The first couple of years
were hit or miss. Some days
we'd have five customers, and
a lot of days we had none. Then
we ramped up our social media
presence, started doing more
advertising locally, and hosted garden clubs and master gardener
groups to tours of the nursery.
We were slowly gaining traction and by word of mouth and a lot
of Facebook posts, the customers started showing up more and
more. From 2017 to 2019, we went from $50,000 to $55,000 in
retail sales, still less than 6% of our total yearly sales. We were
happy with those numbers and then COVID hit, and BOOM! Our
retail shop blew up!
In 2020 we saw an increase of 47% in retail sales and last
year we blew all our records out of the water and have done a
whopping $158,000 in total retail sales registering a total of
14% of our yearly sales for 2021 both wholesale and retail. It's
amazing to see how far we've come. We now have 59 greenhouses
and five propagation houses and we're growing more every year.
At Carolina Native Nursery, our hope is that - after COVID
subsides and it's safe and responsible to live life like we did prepandemic
- our love of gardening and landscaping will continue.
May we continue to plant native plants for the birds, build raised
beds and fill them with veggies and herbs, cultivate flowers and
ferns, and harvest apples and plums from our backyards.
Not just for our bottom line but for the joy and peace of mind
it brings!
http://www.nativenursery.com http://www.GPNMAG.COM
February 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of February 2022
