24 Hours: Alister Davis

CLAIRE ALLISON

Alister Davis is the owner-operator of Plantarama, the wholesale nursery and garden centre he established 43 years ago. The business covers about eight hectares of land and employs seven staff.

I get up here about 8am and set up the retail part of it, the tills, that sort of thing. I've got staff who manage the garden centre and the nursery and the staff in those areas, and I just fill in the gaps where required now. If more staff are needed in the garden centre, I'll help out, or if they need more assistance in assembling wholesale orders, or if there's other nursery work to be done, like weeding or spraying.

I handle all the office work part of it, that's done between me and my wife Marie. We do all the accounts, the catalogues, advertising, the banking, the payroll, all those day-to-day sorts of things that have to be done. A lot of that is done at night.

The propagation is my pet hobby as much as anything. Propagation is at the heart of the system, and it requires pretty hands-on management. We're in two to three times a day to check on things, making sure things are right in terms of nutrition, disease control, temperature control. The majority of our propagation is from cuttings, and needs to be planned three to four years out, from a cutting to an eventual sale. So there's some planning and guesswork in terms of what's going to be sold three years out.

Our focus is on hardy ornamental trees and shrubs. We do a lot of ornamental conifers, ericas, just a general broad range... we used to grow a lot of roses, but we can't handle everything, so we decided to do what we do well. So other lines in the garden centre are bought in.

A big part of our market is throughout South Canterbury – into the Mackenzie Country, and going down to Central Otago, so hardiness is pretty important. We're servicing the rural area with forestry lines and shelter trees.

The wholesale aspect of the business is a large part of it. It used to be about 50/50, but it's probably a little bit stronger in retail now, that seems to be getting stronger and stronger. It's hard to put your finger on why, but I think the girls who run the garden centre maintain it to a higher standard, and we can give good information to customers; we've got experienced staff who know the plants.

Wholesale customers are from about Christchurch south, throughout the South Island. That's how far we travel as far as sales trips go, and Central Otago right down to Invercargill.

It was a bare paddock when I came here. But it's a good position to freight anywhere throughout the South Island. We're on a busy arterial route through to the Mackenzie Country, but still in close proximity to Timaru.

Summertime activity involves a lot more irrigation, watering and feeding, that sort of thing. Winter time, it tends to be more lifting, getting orders sorted out for spring.

Spring's a very busy time with our own planting in the field, potting up, and servicing retail and wholesale customers. Between now and Christmas, we are pretty full on. Even the semi-retired proprietor has to work.

We're open six days a week, Monday to Saturday. Saturday is probably the busiest, retail-wise, but we are busy right through the week. We get more rural customers during the week, and the town folk on the Saturday.

We are very very fortunate with the people who come to this nursery; they're interested in the plants and you develop a lot of quite close friendships over the years with customers. They're not like customers, they're more like friends. Some people could be here two, three times a week, and some of them just come out for a bit of a chat. They enjoy coming out, seeing what's new, seeing what's different.

There's an awful lot more interest now in self-sufficiency, vege gardens, fruit trees – people who have never had them before. That's expanded considerably over the last three years.

People are going more for permanency in their gardens, rather than continually putting in lots of annuals. Some of that's to do with the baby boomers; they're a slightly more ageing population who are wanting a more easy-care garden situation.

And we're also having people in who put in their gardens 20, 30 years ago, and they're now realising it's time to completely revamp the whole thing. They've got shrubs that were expected to grow to three metres, and now they're 10 metres. Gardens can date as well.

The garden shows and TV programmes do have an influence, but I don't think that they're having the influence they did five years ago. But we do see a flow-on effect from events like the Ellerslie Flower Show. It's more themes, ideas that people have got.

I enjoy people. If I didn't, after 40 years you wouldn't still be doing it.

You get the satisfaction of people coming in and saying how well things are doing, and how their garden has progressed, and how well it's looking now.

The down side? It's only when something breaks down, and you might be digging down into a metre of mud and slush to find an irrigation pipe line.

Lunchtimes we try to rotate around so everyone has a reasonable spell for lunch. There's nothing worse than sitting down and starting to eat, and a customer turns up.

There's no rhyme nor reason to it. There can be nobody here and you're thinking it's a bit quiet, and then one car will come in and five others will follow. Then suddenly the car park becomes very small and there's not enough room, so they're parking up the drive, and you haven't got enough staff.

There are customers we're dealing with that would have been our first customers. People come in and say they remember something from when we first started.

I was brought up on a farm, and I worked at another nursery for 12 months, and when there was a change of ownership, I decided it was time to do my own thing. And I worked in an office and very quickly learnt I'm not a person for working indoors. It was just me for a start, I was single then, and started the business when I was 19.

Normally I'm here until we close up. We close at five as far as the nursery goes. You could let the job take over and be here all the time, every day. But there's more to life than that.

When we were establishing we did long hours, starting at 5am and working until 7pm, 8pm. But that was getting established, that's what you do.

What else do we do? We brought up four sons, and we now have family down at Lake Hayes, two sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren, and we get a lot of pleasure from them. We play a little bit of golf badly, but we enjoy it. A little bit of fishing, And just family and friends.

So we do have a life apart from the nursery.

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