Her Green Thumb Got Carried Away
Soon after Susan Iglehart discovered sunshine, she discovered flowers.
In a rush to fill up the sun-drenched garden in her new Connecticut home, she chose annuals over perennials.
Frustrated by the search for the colors she saw in her imagination, she decided to grow her own. Abhorring waste, she planted every seed that came in every pack. And blessed with a generosity of spirit, she shared the extra plants with friends.
A little more than a decade later, Susan Iglehart’s flowers have grown into Susan Iglehart’s Flowers, a kitchen-counter business thriving on word-of-mouth.
Every winter, Iglehart begins cultivating more than 80 hard-to-find varieties of annuals in the made-from-a-kit greenhouses tucked behind her house in Glyndon, Md.’s, steeplechase country.
And for a week in May, the long driveway to her stucco home is busy with faithful customers arriving for orders placed in February.
“It started because I had extras,” she said. “And I can’t stand leftovers.”
When Philip and Susan Iglehart moved from a heavily wooded Lutherville, Md., home to Connecticut years ago, Susan discovered the wonders of sunshine.
“It was like a whole new world,” she said. “I had never been interested in growing anything before. My eyes glazed over when the conversation turned to gardening.
“But I started wanting to grow things, and then I had this vision of a garden with certain colors--white cosmos and pink cleome. And you couldn’t find those colors in garden centers.”
When the Igleharts returned to the Baltimore area in 1988, Barbara Trimble, a friend of more than three decades, introduced Iglehart to the wonders of mass-producing seedlings indoors. “I don’t know if I taught her, or I was a liberating influence,” said Trimble of Owings Mills, Md. “She has always been amazing about projects. She suddenly knew how to do it and began to do it on a grand scale.”
Iglehart, a photographer, said the experience was the same as when she first saw a picture come out of the developer. “Once I saw what happened when I put the seeds in the soil, I was hooked. I just kept growing things, whether I wanted them or not.”
She didn’t need all 250 plants that might come from a single packet of seeds, but she couldn’t bring herself to toss them out. So she made a list of the extras and handed copies to friends, who arrived in May to collect a free sample of Iglehart’s new annuals.
When things started to get out of hand (“I had plants under and on top of everything”), she put a modest price on her plants--one that was increased for the first time this year to $5.99 for a six-pack--and began building greenhouses. News of Susan Iglehart’s Flowers traveled from her neighborhood to as far away as Annapolis, Md., and the Eastern Shore.
“I can’t honestly say whether this hobby pays for itself,” she said. “I’ve never really put those two pieces of paper side by side, if you know what I mean.”
She makes light of the work involved. She has help from a friend during the most labor-intensive times--filling hundreds of trays with more than 18 bales of the potting mixture and putting together the orders before the May pickup dates. She transfers the thousands of seedlings to pots by herself.
The ageratum “Blue Horizon” will be her biggest seller again this year. By the end of the pickup week in May, Iglehart’s greenhouses will be nearly emptied.
Nearer the house are beds planted with great quantities of lilac and hydrangea. She spends the summer supplying floral designers with all this abundance, and she has customers who purchase an armload of her flowers for their homes every week or so.
“I found that people who take the trouble to grow flowers in their gardens really don’t want to go out and mow them down to put in a vase,” she said.
So Iglehart is happy to share hers.
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To receive a price list and order form, write to Susan Iglehart’s Flowers, 3565 Butler Road, Glyndon, MD 21071.
Susan Reimer is a writer for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.
