Gazania plants are one of the many varieties grown at Metrolina Greenhouses.   Abe VanWingerden   The company has 5.8 million square feet of greenhouses and acres of outdoor growing space.

It’s the time of year to pull out your haggard impatiens and replace them with colorful pansies. It’s easy enough to do - you simply buy a flat of flowers, go home and dig. But did you ever wonder where those uniform blossoms of orange, purple and yellow came from?

If you bought them at Lowe’s or Wal-Mart around here, your blooms came from Metrolina Greenhouses in Huntersville. Founded in 1972 by Tom VanWingerden, with a quarter-acre of greenhouse, 2 acres of land and five employees, Metrolina Greenhouses now claims the status of the largest single-site greenhouse in the United States, with 5.8 million square feet of greenhouse space and 700 employees. This state-of-the-art operation along Huntersville-Concord Road is proof that the business of growing plants takes a lot more than a green thumb.

A family of activity
After passing a giant windmill at the front entrance (representative of VanWingerden’s Dutch heritage), visitors enter the nucleus of Metrolina Greenhouses, an open greenhouse space that could easily pass for Grand Central station. Here, employees scurry about on foot as well as on bicycles, commercial golf carts and scooters as they make sure plants are grouped together correctly for delivery.

“We deliver anything from within 500 miles of here, so we go from Atlantic city to Atlanta and to Nashville. ... We do 300 Lowe’s stores and 300 Wal-Marts. That is our market. That’s 99 percent of who we sell to,” says Abe VanWingerden, who now runs the business with his brother, Art, since their father retired to a research and development position within the company. “We do all kinds of products - anything from hanging baskets to potted plants to little flats to containers. ...Each order is unique and different, and that’s what we’re good at.”

Abe says the company does $125 million in yearly sales and has 100 tractor-trailer trucks, plus 25 smaller box trucks. “We’ll ship out 100 tractor-trailer trucks a day, and these box trucks turn two to three times a day,” he says. “It’s an amazing concert of motion. We run two shifts, eight hours apiece, plus a night-loader shift.”

All of the company’s employees, including Abe and Art’s four siblings, work together with the latest in robotic technology, much of it internally designed, to make certain you have nice flowers in your yard. You’ll see everything from automatic transplanters to conveyor belt systems to a car wash-like watering system with an electronic eye.

“We put all of our products through the car wash before we ship them to the stores,” says Abe, adding that machines water plants more evenly than people do. “We’re good at designing machinery to eliminate mundane tasks that people don’t like to do. The one thing I’ve found is that we can’t keep employees working here if they do something they hate every day.”

None of the employees seem to hate what they’re doing at Metrolina Greenhouses because lush greenery and blossoms of all sorts constantly surround them. Looking across the facility, you’ll see acres of plants in stages of growth, just waiting for their season.

“We go 11 months out of the year with product, so in the spring we’re doing early spring pansies, mid-spring impatiens, begonias and petunias. Summertime is zinnias and vinca - all that stuff that grows well with drier conditions,” says Abe. “Fall is pansies and chrysanthemums, and then in the winter we do 3.2 million poinsettias.”

A July visit found recently planted poinsettia clippings beginning their journey to December. “It’s our longest-term crop,” says Abe. “You almost hate to see them leave because it will take us half the year, and we ship them out in about two weeks,” he says, pointing to a tree poinsettia with a 36-inch stalk that will eventually retail for $39.97.

More than a plant
Armed with an MBA from Emory University, Abe handles sales, marketing and merchandising for the company, so he spends a considerable amount of time thinking of new products for customers to try.

“I’m big about the finished product,” says the 38-year-old. “I consider this not a gardening item. I consider this a home décor item. You decorate with plants. You decorate with curtains. You decorate with a lot of stuff, so I’m competing with Target and those guys who are selling you other things for your home. We work with pot colors and all sorts of things to enhance that look for the consumer.”

Whether it’s putting an orange zinnia in a royal blue pot for Florida Gator fans or planting an enormous yellow mum in an elegant black container, Abe and his employees are constantly thinking of ways to attract customers. The company even has a person on staff who color-coordinates plant combinations, deciding what plays well together and what doesn’t compete because of varying fertilization levels.

Taking that even further, Metrolina Greenhouses wants to make sure that what you buy at the store will perform well at home, so in the back of its facility is what Abe calls the world’s largest test garden. With more than 10,000 plants and more than 5,000 varieties, you can find flowers you know as well as flowers you don’t know - at least not yet.

“There are items out there that are 10 to 15 years away, and breeders send them to us to test them and look at them to see how they do. ... Some of this stuff will never make it to the consumer. ...We test heat tolerance, light tolerance and, of course, after-thunderstorm tolerance,” he says. “It [the garden] tests the varieties that we grow today to assure that they’ll grow nicely in a traditional garden. You can grow it nice in a pot, but if it doesn’t perform well at home for you, what’s the point?”

For the VanWingerdens, the point is all about customer satisfaction. If people had success with last year’s impatiens, they’ll come back for more and, hopefully, add some begonias to the mix. “If you don’t have a good experience, you’re not going to keep trying,” says Abe. “Our goal with this test garden is to find those varieties and items that not only create that wow effect at retail but will also create that second wow at home.”