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Traveling The Circuit

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By MONICA BRANDIES | The Brandon News

Published: March 30, 2007

Dennis and Donna Gretton are plant festival people who travel the circuit.

During the spring and fall most sale transactions are at plant festivals.

For example, this spring they started with the Kumquat Festival in Dade City in January. Look for them at the at the University of South Florida Spring Plant Sale on April 14-15, at the Green Thumb Festival in St. Petersburg on April 28-29 and the Herb and Butterfly Festival at USF on June 9-10.

The Grettons were scheduled for only two weekends at home between late January and the summer.

And that pace starts up again in the fall.

They have had a nursery on 2 1/2 acres just east of State Road 39 in Lithia since 1993. They are just 10 minutes south of Fish Hawk Boulevard on Tuten Road and the nursery is open by appointment only.

Call (813) 716-5038. But don't call on weekends.

These two people work every day and even several nights when bad weather threatens their crops.

Plant sellers who depend on festival sales rather than a walk-in nursery drive long miles. They set up tables, unload hundreds of plant trays, work long days, and then load up what is left and return home, sometimes late into the night.

Sometimes Dennis and Donna each take plants to a different event on the same weekend. They travel all over the state.

When they get home, they have to attend to the many plants they are raising for upcoming events.

This is a job people chose because they are talented and dedicated growers and up to a continuous life of challenge. Unfortunately, it does not make them rich, but if they didn't enjoy it, they wouldn't do it.

Donna is also a math teacher at Plant City High School for half of every school day. She taught in the special education department there a few years ago.

Only once, in June 2003, did they go to an out-of-state event and they won't do that again. They were selling their plants at Pageland Watermelon Festival in South Carolina and it was almost closing time on a Saturday night. They had just strolled over to visit the vendors at the next booth when the sound of gunshots rang out very close. Way too close. The body of one of the victims was lying among their plants just where Dennis had been standing a few minutes before.

It was a long time before the man was removed and the Grettons got permission from the police to pack up and head home. They had to leave some plants behind.

A disaster with longer range problems came when quite a few of the large oak trees on their property went down in the 2004 hurricanes and they had a major job getting them removed from the nursery area.

While they were doing that, some of the front nursery area got overgrown. It can happen even to professionals. They have the matter well in hand now and Dennis is working with a borrowed bobcat to finish the last bit.

Meanwhile, they always show up at the festivals with well grown and often unusual plants, including many herbs, annuals, perennials, grasses and pitcher plants. Not many people can grow foxgloves in Florida, but they had some blooming in January. Their lisianthus were in beautiful bloom and the one I brought home continues to bloom months later.

Both were always interested in plants. Donna wanted a herb garden that turned into a herb nursery with more than 60 kinds.

One of the most colorful plants they grow are the salvias or sages.

Some of these are called tropical salvias but Dennis said, "They are hardier than you think, with many able to come through winters in zones 7 and 8." We are in Zone 9.

Dennis grows 30 varieties of these now and is always looking for more.

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