Nursery Thrives With Huge Variety, Low Prices

Treat yourself to a field trip to Logee’s Greenhouses here this winter, but make sure you come in a station wagon, a bus or a small trailer. The operation strikes the newcomer more like an oddball botanical conservatory than a commercial venture.

Not only are there about 120,000 plants for sale--the 2,000 kinds range from orchids to herbs to lemon trees and begonias, which are the Logee specialty--but they are unbelievably reasonable. Almost every price tag on the small plants reads $2.50.

“We propagate about 98% of what we grow,” said Byron Martin, manager of the rare plant operation. “Our propagation house will hold 25,000 plants, and we can turn that over about five times a year. We have a shotgun approach--we have a diverse collection, and we sell a little bit of everything.”

Logee’s Greenhouses was started by William David Logee in 1892, and some of the permanent residents--plants, that is--of the greenhouses are almost 100 years old.

Many Old Varities

Visitors come upon a 60-year-old persimmon tree laden with persimmons, a 100-year-old kumquat tree full of kumquats, a 75-year-old jasmine covered with white fragrant blossoms, and a lemon tree that was delivered to the door 90 years ago by a horse and wagon.

“That was a gift from the famous nurseryman Henry A. Dreer,” said Joy Logee Martin, 76, who owns and runs the greenhouses with her brother, Richard. The lemons look more like football-size grapefruit. “Each one weighs about 4 pounds, and one will make five lemon pies or a gallon of lemonade,” Martin added.

As visitors toured the various greenhouses, some “warm,” which means they stay a cozy 60 degrees at night, and others “cool,” which means they go down to 50 or 55 degrees, Martin couldn’t keep her fingers from pinching off a spent blossom here, a bud there.

“All my father wanted to do was to grow flowers,” she said, pinching a leaf from a vine covered with blue blossoms. “His father sent him to apprentice at J.J. Montgomery Rose Conservatory, which is still operating in Boston. They didn’t have horticultural schools in those days, you know.

Expected to Grow Roses

“When he came back here, he expected to be a big rose grower, but then he got into violets and rare plants,” she went on, an old bougainvillea framing her gray braids with a cascade of papery pink blossoms. “My oldest brother, Ernest, was the businessman of the operation and a begonia hybridizer. He and I developed the begonia collection, which has over 700 varieties. At least 35 of those were introduced by our greenhouses.”

Ernest created a group of compact, ever-blooming wax begonias that were shipped to begonia lovers in England, Australia and Japan, as well as throughout the United States. His favorites, such as Bo Peep, a dark, bronze-leaved begonia with dark pink extra-double flowers, and Mother Goose, a branching type with fluffy white blossoms, are named after nursery rhymes.

One entire greenhouse is devoted to begonias: rex begonias, a shade-loving variety grown for its beautifully colored leaves; fibrous varieties, which are free-flowering and sun-loving; rhizomatous begonias, grown also for their leaves and their early spring blossoms; and trailing begonias perfect for baskets.

This is a begonia collector’s paradise, as well as a welcome starting point for the beginner.

Wide Range of Clients

“We get everyone here, from the person just down the street to collectors,” said Martin. “And lots of our begonias come in the front door. Friends will bring them, saying, ‘Do you have this one?’ And we’ll add it to our collection and start propagating it.” Most of the plants are sold for $2, $2.50 or $3.

Byron Martin, Joy Martin’s son, is the orchid specialist of the clan, and this fall the family’s collection of orchids has produced enough offspring to be up for sale. The Logee orchid list includes 20 cattleya hybrids and 11 species orchids.

Orchids, of course, are a bit more expensive. These beauties range from $8 for Orient Amber Florida, a Sophrolaelio cattleya with a fall-blooming yellow blossom and bright crimson lip, to $15 for Zygopetalum crinitum, a Brazilian species with sprays of fragrant green and purple flowers.

The Logee tropical plants have become so well known that collectors and nursery owners from the tropics are buying plants from the Connecticut greenhouses.

“I have a man from Trinidad buying from us,” Byron Martin said with a smile. “In chilly old New England.”

Built Solar Greenhouse

The family also designed and built a solar greenhouse, which is filled with everything from scented geraniums to 75-year-old myrtles trained into wreaths and standards, and jasmines loaded with fragrant white blossoms. There are also lots of chenille plants, or red-hot cattails, a Brazilian native that flowers year-round and that Martin says is all the rage.

“There’s 170 tons of Connecticut River rock under here,” Joy Martin said of the greenhouse floor. “My son, Geoffrey, who’s a mathematician and physicist, designed it.”

The river rock absorbs the sun’s heat during the day and releases it into the greenhouse at night.

Martin, an herbalist, hybridized a number of scented geraniums, collected many others and grew yet more from seed.

For indoor gardeners who love fragrances, the solar house is a must: Stick your nose into lemon, nutmeg, old spice (the Logee hybrid of nutmeg and apple), ginger and the jasmines that are covered with fragrant white blossoms.

There are so many plants here it’s impossible to leave without at least one or two, or a dozen. But be sure to take the Logees’ advice on light and humidity requirements.