A teenager’s seed list in Pennsylvania.

Park Seed is a South Carolina company with Pennsylvania roots. It was founded in 1868 by George W. Park, then 15, in Libonia, Pennsylvania, to sell seed from his own garden, according to both the company’s history page and English Wikipedia. The company says he printed his first list on a hand letterpress with woodcut illustrations and advertised it in The Rural American; English Wikipedia says that first catalogue ran to eight pages, with two woodcuts, of an aster and a pansy.

The catalogue soon became something closer to a magazine. In 1871 Park began a monthly called The Floral Gazette, renamed Park’s Floral Magazine by 1877, as English Wikipedia and the Seedsmen Hall of Fame, a history site run by Victory Horticultural Group, both record. The company says its early catalogues printed customers’ letters, garden advice, seed swaps and even their nature poetry, and encouraged gardeners to form clubs and swap seeds. It describes The Floral Gazette as “more magazine than catalog,” a forum where readers shared gardening experiences, with a seed-exchange column and advertising from other seed sellers, and says its founder considered gardening “a spiritual delight as well as a useful and pleasant activity.” The Seedsmen Hall of Fame adds that Park enrolled at what is now Michigan State University in 1882 and graduated four years later with a degree in horticulture.

In 1902 the business moved from Libonia to La Park, now Paradise, Pennsylvania, close to a railroad station for faster shipping, the company says, and began offering plants as well as seeds. In 1918 Park married Mary Barratt, a home demonstration agent from Greenwood, South Carolina, whom the company describes as one of his customers; English Wikipedia gives her name as Carol Mary Barratt. After a spell in Dunedin, Florida, where the heat and humidity proved unsuitable for storing seed, the business moved in 1924 to Greenwood, her hometown, where it has remained.

A family firm in Greenwood.

In Greenwood the business stayed in the family for three generations. Mary Barratt Park became her husband’s business partner, English Wikipedia says, and their sons, George Barratt Park and William John Park, later led it in turn, followed by a nephew, J. Leonard Park, and a niece, Karen Park Jennings, according to the Seedsmen Hall of Fame. The company says George and Mary’s grandchildren ran the business “until the early 21st Century.”

Its buildings grew with it. English Wikipedia records a move in 1950 from a large old house to a modern storefront with environmental controls to protect the quality of its seed, and the completion in 1961 of the core buildings of a campus on Greenwood’s northern edge, near Hodges.

Park also began to collect other gardening names. In 1975 it acquired Wayside Gardens, an Ohio company founded in 1920, and moved it to South Carolina, English Wikipedia says. In 2005 the Park family sold the company to Donald Hachenberger, a Florida real estate executive, the same source records. Park Seed then bought the rose company Jackson & Perkins in 2007, and Jackson & Perkins moved to Greenwood that year, the trade magazine Greenhouse Grower reported in August 2010.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all garden seed names: Park Seed, Select Seeds, Johnsons Seeds, Kiepenkerl, Sperli, Higgledy Garden and Seedaholic. Seed brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to larger horticultural groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a garden centre rack to a mail-order catalogue or a website.

A seed brand’s identity is usually carried less by the seed itself than by a packet, a catalogue and a name, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its packing or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its seed is packed and sent from.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where it packs and ships its seed and how its packets and catalogues have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Your success and pleasure are more to Park than your money.”

The current ownership took shape in two steps. In August 2010 the private equity firm Blackstreet Capital bought Park Seed and Jackson & Perkins, which were combined as Jackson & Perkins Park Acquisition, based in Greenwood, Greenhouse Grower reported; The Post and Courier of Charleston covered the sale on 23 August 2010, according to English Wikipedia. Then, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated 9 June 2015, Western Capital Resources of Omaha, Nebraska, announced a merger and contribution agreement covering J&P Park Acquisitions, which it said “owns and operates the Park Seed online seed store,” with closing expected on or around 1 July 2015. Western Capital Resources has owned Park Seed since 2015; its annual report for 2021 describes its Direct to Consumer segment as “a direct marketer of roses, plants, seeds, holiday gifts and home restoration products,” and also names a Park Wholesale brand. The same report introduces Park Seed as “founded in 1868,” with “over 150 years in the business.”

The identity the company presents still rests on its founder. Its history page leads with George W. Park’s motto, “Your success and pleasure are more to Park than your money,” and describes the business as beginning at the kitchen table of a 15-year-old who hoped to sell seeds from his own garden. It sells flower, vegetable and herb seeds alongside bulbs, live plants and garden accessories, English Wikipedia says, through its catalogue and website.

For a design guide, Park Seed shows how a mail-order seed house can carry a founder’s voice through more than 150 years of catalogues and several changes of owner. Compare Select Seeds, a far younger catalogue built around heirloom flowers, and Johnsons Seeds, a British seed brand. For this guide we use a garden green and a petunia magenta with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Park Seed’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.