ItSaul Plants in Atlanta was founded in 1998 with the mission of delivering unique plants to the industry. It has already developed a reputation for providing unusual plants that come from sources near and far. Some are collected overseas and some are discovered, literally, in the owners' backyards.

Brothers Bob and Richard Saul and Bob's wife Kathy have owned Saul Nurseries, a multi-location Georgia wholesale production company, since 1981. They teamed with Ozzie Johnson, an Atlanta landscape designer specializing in high-end and Japanese gardens, to create ItSaul Plants.

"At Saul Nurseries, we'd always worked with new plants, but we always just gave them away," Bobby said. "Many kept winding up in catalogs around the country and we just said, 'Hey?'"

ItSaul was created with a dual purpose -- finding, breeding and marketing new plants and also selling propagative material to Saul Nurseries. Richard runs an active breeding program working extensively with Echinacea and Kniphofia. Ozzie makes overseas seed-collecting trips about twice a year looking for new plants.

One of the first types of plants promoted heavily by the company was asarums -- American and Asian woodland groundcovers and perennials. While ItSaul had several varieties not available elsewhere, they soon found it takes more than just inventory to sell new plants.

"We saw dollar signs. We thought we'd make $1 million on asarums," Ozzie said. "But we realized there's a lot of education involved. People were asking why they had to pay $200 per tray for these plants."

While asarums are gaining popularity and remain an important part of ItSaul's product mix, the company has diversified. ItSaul Plants grows perennials, annuals and woody varieties and produces them from seed, cuttings, division and tissue culture.

Mix it up

"We decided to produce the whole gamut. Everything comes together in the garden. Why focus on just one category of plants at a nursery?" Bobby said. "If you expand your palette, you have five times the plants to choose from than if you focused on just perennials or woody plants."

Diversifying product lines is becoming more common at commercial nurseries, Bobby said. This has happened, in part, by growers seeing annuals, perennials and woodies being used and sold together successfully in mixed containers.

"We have customers that were just annual growers or just perennial growers who had tunnel vision. But now many perennial growers who were turning their noses up at annuals are starting to grow more of these unique annuals."

The key is color, he said. Most consumers don't differentiate between plant categories, and just want plants that will add color to their landscapes. Growers should concentrate on the same.

"This is a whole different type of business. And we knew it would take a lot of work on our part to educate our customers," Bobby said. "I guessed it would take four to five years to get up and running and I'd say we're on schedule."

Major hurdles

Establishing ItSaul Plants hasn't been without its challenges. One major hurdle is dealing with so many new plants. It's been difficult to find the best methods of propagating certain new cultivars, species and even genera. Finding, breeding and evaluating plants also takes years of work.

"We always keep our eyes open and everybody at the nursery is trained to look for sports. Of course, we get a lot of junk, but we have found some good new plants this way," Bobby said.

About one in 25 plants selected for evaluation will be deemed worthy for production. A plant not only has to prove itself in the landscape, but it also must have commercial value. "It has to have that potential for popularity within the general public. We don't want to release something that just a few collectors will find attractive," Bobby said.

Ozzie has been traveling to Japan on average once a year for 15 years, sometimes in cooperation with the Atlanta Botanical Garden. During these trips, he spends about 80 percent of his time at botanical gardens and other horticultural facilities and about 20 percent of his time collecting seeds from the wild.

In those years he's brought back several new varieties of Asarum, Acorus, Ophiopogon and Tricyrtis. He's currently interested in bringing back new genotypes of common landscape plants, such as hardier Chinese hollies or more disease-resistant Kousa dogwoods.

To date, ItSaul Plants has introduced 40 new plants to the industry, of which about six are going through the patent process. However, not all new plants released by ItSaul will be protected legally.

In some cases, ItSaul plans to work with other large companies to introduce plants.

Diversity of staff

The ItSaul staff is, in one way, very similar to its product mix -- diversified. The Sauls have found that talented co-workers don't have to come from a nursery background.

Nursery manager Lisa Bartlett, for instance, worked in the comedy industry booking jobs for well-known entertainers, including Jeff Foxworthy, Steve Harvey and Tim Wilson. She was hired part-time by Saul Nurseries to water plants and she used the job primarily as a means to relieve work stress.

"I picked up plant knowledge and names pretty quickly and the Sauls eventually asked if I wanted to work full time. I said yes. I gave up a lot of money and travel, but I've never been happier," she said.

When ItSaul Plants was being developed, Bartlett was chosen to manage the company. "She initially said she was worried she didn't have enough schooling, but I told her, 'You're perfect. You're a clean slate and I can meld your mind,'" Bobby said. Growing assistant Karen Stever has a doctorate degree in biochemistry and was working in the pharmaceutical industry before joining Saul Nurseries and becoming a part of ItSaul. "I've always had an interest in growing and have been a backyard gardener. I thought this was a great industry and the lifestyle is much different than pharmaceutical research or biotechnology," Stever said. "So I followed my personal interests and ended up here."

ItSaul Plants Founded: 1998 by Bobby, Richard and Kathy Saul, Ozzie Johnson and Karen Stever. Location: Atlanta. Employees: 8. Specialty: New selections of woody, herbaceous and annual ornamental plants. Production space: 1/4 acre of heated greenhouses and 15 acres of outdoor production. For more: ItSaul Plants, 5007 New Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA 30341; (770) 458-0028; fax (770) 458-0172.

. © 2002 Branch-Smith Publishing