Monrovia:
100 Years of
Growing Beautifully

Here is the strange thing about Monrovia, and it is the thing worth sitting with: it is a business built entirely on being unable to hurry.

Most companies you read about are engaged in a frantic effort to make the gap between "we had an idea" and "someone paid us money" as short as physically possible. Software companies dream of shipping a feature at 2 p.m. and having revenue by 2:15. Monrovia cannot do this. A shrub takes years. You put a small green thing in a container, you tend it, you wait, and eventually - after a span of time during which an entire venture-backed startup could have been founded, scaled, acquired, and shut down - you have something you can sell. The plant does not care about your quarterly targets. This is, if you think about it, a profoundly unfashionable way to make money, and Monrovia has been doing it for one hundred years.

The company was founded in 1926 by Harry E. Rosedale Sr., a Danish immigrant who arrived in America in 1923 with a background in the nursery trade and, apparently, a very specific ambition: to grow the highest-quality, best-looking plants in North America. He started on ten acres in the town of Monrovia, California, which is where the name comes from - not the founder, the zip code. This is a small but pleasing detail. The company is named after a place, and the place is named after James Monroe, and so a nursery in Oregon carries, at two removes, the name of a U.S. president who died in 1831. Business is full of these little archaeological layers if you look.

What Rosedale actually did that mattered - the thing that turned a nice regional nursery into an institution - was help pioneer the practice of growing plants in containers. Before this, if you wanted to sell a plant, you dug it out of the ground, which stressed the plant, which meant it often died shortly after the customer got it home, which is a bad outcome for a business whose entire value proposition is "this plant will live and be beautiful." Growing in containers meant the plant never had to be uprooted. It could be sold and transplanted with its roots intact and its dignity, such as it is, preserved. The container plant is now so completely normal that you would never think of it as an innovation, which is the highest compliment you can pay an innovation.

In 1941 Monrovia did something else quietly clever: it became one of the first U.S. growers to trademark a plant, a hardier pyracantha it called the Rosedale Pyracantha. Think about what a trademark on a plant means. It means the company had decided that the specific variety was the product - not "a plant," but this plant, distinguishable from all others, ownable, brandable. This is the seed (sorry) of the entire modern business, in which Monrovia's real asset is not that it grows plants but that it grows plants nobody else has. Today the catalog runs to more than 4,000 varieties, of which more than 250 are exclusives.

The Green Pot as a Financial Instrument

The branded container is the whole trick, and it is worth being precise about why. A plant is close to a commodity. A hydrangea is a hydrangea; the customer standing in the garden center cannot easily tell a well-grown one from a badly-grown one until it either thrives or dies in their yard, months later, long after the transaction. This is what economists call an information asymmetry, and it is usually a race to the bottom - if buyers cannot tell quality apart, sellers stop paying for it.

Monrovia's answer was to make the pot itself the quality signal. The distinctive container says: a company willing to put its name on this is betting that it will live. That is a brand doing exactly what a brand is for - carrying a promise across the gap where the customer cannot verify the goods themselves. Monrovia sells roughly 22 million of these promises a year, mostly through independent garden centers, increasingly through its own e-commerce channel, and the entire edifice rests on the pot meaning something. It is, functionally, a certificate of authenticity that happens to also hold dirt.

Inside Monrovia the operative word is "Craftsmen" - people who, in the company's own framing, use their hearts, minds and hands to produce beauty. This is the kind of thing that could be pure marketing, and maybe some of it is, but it is also a genuinely smart quality-control strategy. When a plant's success is invisible until months after it leaves your hands, you cannot inspect quality at the loading dock. You have to build it into the person doing the growing. Culture, in a business like this, is the cheapest and most durable QA system available.

The stated operating system fits on an index card: Grow Beautifully (make plants everyone can succeed with), Grow Confidently (use science - breeding and propagation - to make them resilient), and Grow Responsibly (lean on beneficial insects and organic methods, minimize chemical inputs). Three verbs a new hire can act on before lunch. The best mission statements are not paragraphs; they are instructions.

One more detail, because it is too good to leave out. Monrovia does not simply wait for better plants to arrive. It works with breeders worldwide and, most romantically, with plant explorer Dan Hinkley, who literally hunts for new species in far corners of the world. Several Monrovia exclusives - the Tectonic Begonia series, the Shear Genius Cotoneaster, a holly fern named after a Stegosaurus - trace back to his discoveries. It is a reminder that behind the tidy green pots on the shelf there is, somewhere upstream, a person on a mountainside deciding that a particular leaf is worth bringing home.