Armstrong Garden Centers Brand Guidelines: An Employee-Owned Chain From an 1889 Nursery

A nurseryman in Ontario, California.

Armstrong Garden Centers dates its story to 1889 and to John S. Armstrong, a nurseryman from Brantford, Canada. The Ontario City Library’s Robert E. Ellingwood Model Colony History Room, which holds the Armstrong Nurseries Collection, says he arrived in Upland, California, in March 1889 and learned the trade at the Horsley and Eaton Nursery before starting a nursery of his own and planting grapes, fruit and citrus trees. The Los Angeles Business Journal, marking the company’s 125th year in April 2014, wrote that in 1889 he was selling olive and eucalyptus trees at his Ontario nursery; the company’s own history describes his first venture as a few acres of eucalyptus and olive trees.

The library’s guide dates the original Armstrong Nursery to 1898, when he bought three lots at D Street and Euclid Avenue in Ontario, and says he started a mail-order catalogue of roses and fruit trees in 1902. The company says its first retail garden center opened on Euclid around the turn of the century, and that the catalogue became a source of information for customers across the United States and Canada and a forerunner of the modern wholesale nursery catalogue. The library adds that he kept buying acreage as demand for ornamental trees and shrubs grew in the early 1900s.

The library’s guide says the business stayed a family company until the 1980s, when the family sold the nursery. The company names John Armstrong’s son J. Awdry Armstrong and then John S. Armstrong Jr. as later leaders, and says that in 1974 the board appointed Don L. Rogers president; he bought Rosedale Nurseries, adding three stores for a total of eight garden centers. In 1989, the company says, Rogers and Mike Kunce made Armstrong an employee-owned company rather than a privately held one, with Kunce as president, and added a growing division, Armstrong Growers.

Roses, fruit and two acquisitions.

For much of the twentieth century Armstrong was a rose name. The company says it introduced its first series of roses in the early 1920s and, in the 1930s, set up a research and development department led by Dr Walter Lammerts, whose hybrids included ‘Chrysler Imperial’ and ‘Charlotte Armstrong’; it names Herb Swim, Dr David Armstrong, Jack Christensen and Tom Carruth as later breeders. The library’s guide says the nursery pioneered new rose varieties from the 1940s, that more than two million ‘Charlotte Armstrong’ roses have been sold, and that the variety is the official flower of Ontario, California. The collection itself holds Armstrong’s memoirs, nursery journals, ledgers, catalogues and about 4,000 photographs, along with research notes on the hybridising of that rose and on Herb Swim’s roses.

Fruit mattered too. The company credits the nursery with introductions in the 1940s and 1950s including the Boysenberry, the Babcock peach, the Snow Queen nectarine and the Bonanza dwarf peach, and says it also grew and marketed citrus, berries, grapes and avocados alongside ornamentals and perennials.

Expansion came by acquisition. In 1998, the company says, it bought the San Diego chain Nurseryland, closing six of its fifteen centers and remodelling the other nine. In March 2008 a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of 15 Pike Family Nurseries retail locations to Armstrong, Greenhouse Grower reported on 5 March 2008, and the stores were to keep the Pike name. The company says it first became the majority shareholder of Pike Nurseries, that Kunce moved to Atlanta to lead it, and that in 2014 Pike became wholly owned by Armstrong and employee-owned as part of it.

Garden-centre chains and their signs.

Garden-centre chains are retailers whose identity is read first from the road: a sign over a large site, repeated on carrier bags, catalogues, loyalty cards and websites. The chains in this series come from France, England, California, Ontario and New Zealand, and most of them publish their logos and colours on their own websites rather than in public brand manuals, so the palettes in these guides are our own interpretations.

Formats vary widely. At one end is the large out-of-town garden centre with plant halls, outdoor nursery areas and, where the company says it offers them, a café, a pet department and a Christmas shop. At the other are smaller town-centre plant shops: Truffaut, which French Wikipedia says opened a garden centre at Le Chesnay in 1964, opened an urban format at Boulogne-Billancourt in 2017.

Ownership is just as varied, and each guide states it as a dated fact. Some chains are family companies, such as Botanic, which Le Figaro described in 2017 as owned by its three founding families. Others belong to farmers’ cooperatives: Toute la Franchise wrote in 2016 that Gamm vert was the sign of the cooperative group InVivo. Others again have been owned by investment funds or listed groups, or have been sold, merged or closed, and their guides say plainly what happened and when.

The chains also present themselves through the calendar and through their own ranges: spring planting, summer outdoor living and Christmas each bring their own events, and many chains sell own-label products under names the companies choose themselves. Corporate pages on founders, owners and history complete the picture, and each guide marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Gardening without Guesswork.

Today the company is based in Glendora, California. The Los Angeles Business Journal counted 31 stores statewide in April 2014; the company’s history page gives 29 locations in Southern California and describes the Armstrong and Pike businesses together, at 49 stores, as “the largest independent garden retail company in the U.S.” The library’s guide calls Armstrong Garden Centers one of the largest independent retail nurseries in the western United States. The company names Monte Enright as president and chief executive, and says that under him it has added a landscape consultation and installation division and an outdoor living category with outdoor furniture, barbecues and outdoor kitchens.

Its brand line is “Gardening without Guesswork,” which the company presents as the tagline its associates work to live up to through customer service and gardening advice. The Armstrong name still connects the chain to the nursery the library’s collection documents, from early catalogues to the rose that became a city’s official flower, and, as the Los Angeles Business Journal noted in 2014, its stores still sell eucalyptus, the tree John Armstrong started with. In the same article the paper counted Armstrong among a handful of surviving Los Angeles County businesses of that age, and an Armstrong vice president put its staying power down to selling good products, giving good service and changing with the times.

For a design guide, Armstrong Garden Centers shows a founder’s surname carried from a rose catalogue onto a chain of employee-owned stores. Compare Calloway’s and Sheridan Nurseries, two other North American garden-centre chains. For this guide we use a rose red, a deep leaf green and a warm sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Armstrong Garden Centers’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.