The Great Lab Experiment

We have long been fascinated with tissue culture, and it’s ability to produce a large number of difficult to propagate plants in a short time. Without tissue culture, many of the plants we grow in our gardens today, simply wouldn’t be available. New hostas, that we all enjoy, would still be priced north of $200 each, as they were before tissue culture became mainstreamed. We have been fortunate through the years to work with a number of smaller labs to assist us in getting new plants to market. In exchange for their assistance, we would allow them to also sell our new plants to other retailers, which is the only way it would be economical for them to work with us. For decades, we have toyed with the idea of building our own lab, but never could make the required input costs equal the expected financial returns.

Let me pause and explain what tissue culture is, for those who don’t have scientific lab backgrounds. Tissue culture is effectively nothing more that taking cuttings or dividing a plant with a scalpel instead of a large knife. At such a very small size, plants are very sensitive to disease, so instead of using typical potting soil, the plants are grown in sterile containers, primarily in Agar, a translucent gel made from algae. Instead of using typical commercial fertilizers, nutrients along with plant growth hormones are precisely added to the agar. The nutrients only last 4-6 weeks, so they must be constantly re-added, and the plants re-divided at the same intervals. Unlike growing regular sized plants where one fertilizer fits all, the same is not true with tissue culture. It takes quite a bit of experimentation and tweaking, especially for plants that aren’t regularly produced in tissue culture. Miniscule details like buying the correct brand of plastic growing containers or the right brand of distilled water, can be the difference between success and failure with each plant.

Many of the plants we work with, such as variegated agaves, take up to ten years from discovery to market, so at my advanced age, the idea of being able to reduce that time to two years, while making them more affordable, was quite appealing. We’ve spent a lifetime collecting numerous rare specimens, many of which need to be made available widely, but often they simply don’t propagate well or quickly using conventional techniques.

When COVID hit, a window opened. Due to the crazy plant demand and high sales volume, we found ourselves with some extra cash one year, and decided to take a gamble on building our own lab. Without a lab, many plants like our clonal trillium selections, etc. would never be able to be commercially available. After traveling around the country and visiting seven different labs, we were ready to go. Even our financing institutions looked at our projected sales and agreed that this was a safe gamble, but then, their job is to loan money.

By March 2022, the lab building was framed, as you can see below.

As we moved into spring 2022, interior construction picked up speed as the rooms were sectioned off and the shelving was added.

By August 2022, we had equipment in place, and were ready to hire staff. Our challenge would be to keep the lab afloat financially until we could make it break even. We calculated it would cost us $150k annually to operate, including our loan for the building construction and equipment. With the incredible demand for variegated century plants, that crop alone appeared to be enough to financially carry the lab.

The lab consists of five rooms, a non-sterile room for plant preparation, an office, and three sterile areas, a media preparation room, a plant cutting/division room, and a growing room.

Our lab manager, Aparna Vanguri, came to us, first as a part-time garden worker, after a career in tissue culture with BASF and Syngenta. Samantha Werley joined Aparna after her school training here in NC. The first few months were frightening, as failures due to contamination nearly exhausted our supply of several rare plants. The time required to trial and develop repeatable protocols for the odd plants that we were trying to culture, kept us up at night with second thoughts, third thoughts, etc. We soldiered on, and by fall 2022, the successes were surpassing the failures.

By summer 2023, we had a number of plants emerging from the lab and being rooted into soil. Most notably of those were our clonal baptisia hybrids, which have long posed a propagation dilemna for nurseries around the world. Agaves followed soon behind.

Then, 2024 happened. While we’ve seen ups and downs throughout our 38 years in business, we’ve never seen a down cycle of plant sales like we’ve seen in 2024, that is putting our very existence to the test. The sales of variegated century plants that we had depended on to fund the lab, fell precipitously. By the end of June, it was clear we had no option but to close our lab. Despite our dreams of producing an array of rare and difficult to propagate plants, while providing horticulture students a production lab in which to learn, it was not to be. I’m confident we gave it our best shot, but after this spring, there simply weren’t funds to keep it going, and remain in business.

Where possible, plants from the lab are being dispersed to other labs, but many of our plants were for collectors, and mainstream labs simply can’t afford to produce these. We can’t thank our team of Aparna and Sam, along with our summer intern, Anna, enough for the incredible work they did during our two year run. We have yet to make a decision on selling off the equipment until we gauge the interest in finding someone to rent the lab space. We’ll see what the universe has in store next.