A nurseryman, an adman and a radio show.

Miracle-Gro began with a man who disliked the telephone. According to The New York Times, in an interview with Horace Hagedorn published in July 1993 and in his obituary of February 2005, a German-born nurseryman from Geneva, New York, named Otto Stern walked into the small Manhattan advertising agency where Hagedorn worked in the mid-1940s and asked, in person, to buy advertising time on the WOR radio programme “Rambling With Gambling.” Stern sold plants and trees by mail, and they were arriving at customers’ homes in poor condition.

The two men became friends and then partners. Hagedorn told the Times in 1993 that he had been looking for a retail product that was “lightweight, concentrated and consumable,” guided by a piece of advice from a fellow adman: “Find a need and fill it.” Stern, he said, was more interested in selling fruit trees and plants, but in the end the partners settled on plant fertilizer. They read about O. Wesley Davidson, a Rutgers University professor known for his work on orchids, and hired him as a technical consultant to develop a water-soluble formula. In Hagedorn’s account, Davidson also answered customers’ questions and “became our research lab.”

The name came from home. The 2005 obituary says Hagedorn’s wife, Peggy, came up with “Miracle-Gro,” and that the company was founded in 1950. In the 1993 interview Hagedorn dated the partnership with Stern to 1944, so the two accounts put the start of the business at different points; both agree on the next step. In 1951 Hagedorn wrote the copy for a full-page newspaper advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune, which he told the Times brought in many times its own cost in cash sales.

The business that grew from it traded as Stern’s Miracle-Gro and was based in Port Washington on Long Island, where Hagedorn had moved in 1942. He described it to the Times as a family-owned company that concentrated on sales and marketing and let other firms mix, package and distribute the product. He became the company’s full-time sales manager in 1963, and the obituary says he bought out Stern in the mid-1980s.

From a mail-order nursery to Scotts Miracle-Gro.

Hagedorn credited timing for much of the early success. “We were in the right place at the right time,” he told The New York Times in 1993, describing the postwar move of returning servicemen into new suburban homes, and the customer base Stern’s mail-order nursery had built up during the years of wartime victory gardens. The obituary describes his approach in three parts: advertise on television, sell through the new chains of hardware stores, and find an easier way to apply the product than the original method of dissolving a spoonful of green granules in a gallon of water. His employees, it says, came up with a device that delivered the fertilizer through a garden hose.

The range widened from there. Hagedorn told the Times that customer letters had suggested a fertilizer applicator combined with a lawn sprinkler, and that the company had developed formulas for particular plants such as roses and African violets for gardeners who preferred a specialised product to an all-purpose one. He also described the United Kingdom as the company’s most important overseas market, with a plant of its own there.

The decisive change came in 1995, when Stern’s Miracle-Gro merged with The Scotts Company of Marysville, Ohio. The New York Times reported the merger agreement in January 1995. English Wikipedia’s article on the parent company traces Scotts to Orlando M. Scott, who began selling seed in Marysville in 1868, and records that it was owned by ITT from 1971, became independent through a buyout in 1986 and went public in 1992 before the merger with Miracle-Gro. The 2005 obituary says the deal was an all-stock transaction that left the Hagedorn family as major shareholders, and quotes Horace Hagedorn telling The Wall Street Journal a year later: “The truth of the matter is, Scotts didn’t buy Miracle-Gro. The truth of the matter is, we bought Scotts.” His son James Hagedorn went on to become chairman and chief executive of the combined company, which Wikipedia says was known as The Scotts Company until 2005 and as The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company since.

Under Scotts, Miracle-Gro sits beside the company’s lawn brand, the pest-control brand Ortho, which Scotts bought from Monsanto in 1999, and the consumer marketing of Roundup. Wikipedia lists Miracle-Gro among the brands the company makes in the United States, alongside Osmocote and Hyponex.

Design and documentation.

Garden-care and pest-control brands share the shelf with paint, cleaning products and hardware, and they have to be read quickly by someone standing in a store aisle or a garden centre. Their identities are carried by a few repeated signals: a bottle, bag or can in a single strong colour, a name set large on the front panel, and, for some, a mascot or a short slogan that has run in advertising for years.

These packs also carry text the brand does not choose. In the United States, pesticide products are registered with the Environmental Protection Agency, and their labels set out directions for use, precautionary statements and a registration number. That regulatory panel sits beside the brand’s own graphics on the same container, so the designed part of the label and the required part have to work together.

Some of the names in this group have changed owners more than once, while others have stayed with the company that launched them. Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name and packaging are presented, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A green-and-yellow package and a painted backyard.

Miracle-Gro was, from its first newspaper page, a brand built by an advertising man, and its look reflects that. The New York Times wrote in 2005 that the green-and-yellow package Hagedorn commissioned became so familiar that other companies, including AT&T and Hyundai, used it in advertisements for their own products, and that Hagedorn charged them nothing as long as they spelled Miracle-Gro correctly.

The print advertising leaned on a homely, illustrated America. In the 1993 interview Hagedorn said that about ten years earlier he had found, through an artist’s representative, Joseph Satari, a painter who had worked with Norman Rockwell, and that he used him to give the advertisements a Rockwell look; the obituary describes the commissions as homey paintings by a Rockwell colleague. In the same interview he described a contest he had just announced for a record-breaking tomato, open only to tomatoes grown with Stern’s Miracle-Gro.

On television the brand used familiar faces. Hagedorn told the Times that the actress Helen Hayes had been a friend, and that the actor James Whitmore, whose weathered face suited the part of a farmer, appeared in the company’s commercials. He described the format as celebrities at either end, “as bookends,” with interviews in between in which real gardeners, found through garden clubs and plant societies, described their results in their own words. People, he said, equate age with experience.

For a design guide, Miracle-Gro shows how a product with nothing much to see — a few spoonfuls of granules dissolved in water — can be given an identity through colour, illustration and plain-spoken testimony. Compare it with Ortho, its stablemate at Scotts, and Roundup, whose consumer marketing Scotts handles. For this guide we use leaf green and bloom yellow on cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Miracle-Gro’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.