Inside Gardener's
Securing a brighter future by building community, empowering gardeners, and cultivating new generations of earth stewards.
Securing a brighter future by building community, empowering gardeners, and cultivating new generations of earth stewards.
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“Gardener’s Supply is in business to spread the joys and rewards of gardening, because gardening nourishes the body, elevates the spirit, builds community, and makes the world a better place.”
-Mission Statement since 1990
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Will Raap spearheads the launch of Gardener's Supply Company as a catalog mail order company offering innovative solutions from around the world for better, easier gardening. We’re one of the first to offer enabling products for aging and physically challenged gardeners.
Our first offices, test garden, and warehouse open in Winooski, VT. Products for composting, weather protection, water conservation, organic gardening, and physically limited gardeners prove to be the most popular.
Gardener's Supply commits 8% of profits to support community organizations using gardening and local food production as a force for good.
Gardener's Supply establishes an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), encouraging every employee to "think and act like an owner," because now they are! We move to a new building on the site of an abandoned slaughterhouse in Burlington's Intervale – a degraded, 300-acre floodplain. We organize work parties to clean up decades of illegal dumping so that our new "backyard" can become a center for community gardening and food production.
Recognizing an opportunity to divert tens of thousands of tons of yard and food waste from the local landfill, Gardener's Supply establishes the Intervale Compost Project. Quickly becoming the largest composting operation in VT, it restores fertility to 100s of acres in the Intervale floodplain and leads to the development of the Intervale Center — now an independent non-profit national leader in organic farming, community agriculture, and land restoration.
Gardener's Supply dives into product design and development, opening a small manufacturing factory in Vermont and paving the way to hundreds of best-selling gardening solutions — like our Vertex supports, SunLite® Gardens, lifetime aluminum corners, and signature cedar garden beds.
Visitors welcome! Expanding our small retail store into a full-service garden center strengthens our local presence and helps us promote a stronger local food system. This leads to the development of the Intervale Community Farm — one of the first community-supported agriculture (CSA) membership farms in the country and now the largest in Vermont.
Steadfast in our commitment to environmental health through gardening, Gardener's Supply is at the forefront of the national 20th Earth Day anniversary. We raise our voice about restoring soil health, the risk of GMOs and glyphosate, the pollinator crisis, and the value of community and school gardens.
Our very first Intervale Harvest Festival highlights the local farming community and the resurgent agricultural riches of this once neglected and abused floodplain.
The year of the first secure internet retail transaction — and a year before the launches of both Amazon and eBay — we opened a rudimentary store on Yahoo!
Gardener's Supply launches our “Be a Grower, Not a Mower” campaign to boost food and flower gardening, as an alternative to lawns. Now, more than two decades later, the environmental and human cost of the American lawn obsession is still coming to light.
We're quick to snap up the gardeners.com URL and launch excitedly into the digital age with a site that offers not only gardening products, but also guidance for gardeners of all experience levels and in all sorts of climates.
Gardener's Supply takes a stand on GMOs. Monsanto threatens to sue. (We prevail.)
Gardener's takes a stand on pollinator decline and helps launch what is now the Pollinator Partnership. Given that an estimated one in three bites of food depend on pollinators, their survival and proliferation is still one of our primary areas of focus.
Gardener's Supply employees give back to the community by dropping blooming containers at Burlington, VT non-profits in our first annual Random Acts of Gardening event.
Our second garden center, the largest in Vermont, is a destination for gardeners, houseplant lovers, and anyone who needs a little respite from everyday hustle and bustle. Dogs are welcome too!
Michelle Obama plants the White House Garden, a collaborative concept devised by one of our Garden Crusader awardees Roger Doiron (who went on to found SeedMoney.org).
Gardener's Supply transitions to 100% employee-ownership. Every winter solstice we mark this anniversary by serving delicious local pies to our customers in a figurative sharing of a "piece of the pie." As employee-owners, we put our hearts and souls into everything we do, and pride ourselves in providing the best customer service and gardening advice in the industry.
Gardener's Supply builds a large distribution center in Milton, VT.
We establish the "Company Farm" and grow more than 300 pounds of potatoes for people in need—right outside our headquarters. Today there are farms at each of our locations, growing food for local hunger-relief organizations.
Gardener's Supply becomes a certified B Corporation, solidifying our commitment to using the power of our business to address social and environmental problems. By taking on this designation, we commit to considering the impact of our decisions on our employee-owners, our customers, our suppliers, our community, and our environment.
Gardener's Supply is named a B Corporation "Best for the World" honoree. The award recognizes companies who have been scored in the top 10% of all Certified B Corporations for their impact on workers, community and environment. Successive awards follow in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Gardener's Supply becomes a key supporting partner of KidsGardening.org, helping empower kids to not only grow their own food, but also ignite their education though hands on learning, understand the power of communities coming together, learn about the natural world, and understand where their food comes from.
Sarah Rutherford, widely known for her stunning 'Her Voice Carries'; mural series, designs and paints a larger-than-life mural on our Milton warehouse. The first thing drivers see as they cross the town line from Colchester, it features the crocosmia (Sarah's favorite flower), a ruby-throated hummingbird, a butterfly, and lilies — all which of which flourish in Vermont.
We launch our Garden to Give initiative, joining forces with individuals and organizations to donate surpluses from our gardens to local food banks and hunger relief programs.
We open our third garden center in picturesque Lebanon, NH. If you visit, be sure to pronounce it Leba-nin (as the locals do), not Leba-non (like the country).
We are recognized as a company that engages its employee-owners, its community, and "is an example all employee-owned companies can proudly seek to replicate." Woohoo!
Gardener’s Supply is honored with the Vermont Governor’s Award for Business Excellence in Supporting the Mature Workers. This award recognizes employers that demonstrate exceptional commitment to employment practices that benefit and support the inclusion and retention of mature workers, resulting in a positive impact on Vermont’s economic sustainability as well as the health and well-being of older Vermonters.
We introduce our ground-breaking Vertex Tomato Cages and Bamboo Light Gardens, for which we win the Direct Gardening Association's Green Thumb Award — our 33rd Green Thumb award-winning product. We’re thrilled!
Expanding beyond Vermont and New Hampshire, Gardener’s Supply opens a garden center in Hadley, Massachusetts — our 4th retail location.
Gardener’s Supply receives a “Spirit of the ADA” Award, given to organizations whose employment practices reflect the spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The award is given each year by the Vermont Governor’s Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities.
To help combat plastic waste in the nursery industry, Gardener’s Supply holds our first annual Plastic Take-Back Day, giving gardeners an opportunity to return their used nursery pots, which are notoriously hard to recycle, and tend to end up in landfills. Our annual efforts since 2021 have led to 59 pallets of plastic nursery pots diverted from landfills and converted into new horticultural containers.
Gardener's Supply receives another B Corporation "Best for the World" award — our 8th since 2015. This award recognizes companies who have been scored in the top 10% of all Certified B Corporations for their impact on workers, community, and environment.
In addition to expanding our presence in The Granite State, our 5th retail location in the coastal town of Greenland, New Hampshire, allows us to serve customers in northeast Massachusetts as well as southern Maine.
