Sheridan Nurseries Brand Guidelines: The Ontario Grower Founded by Landscape Architects in 1913

Two landscape architects who needed plants.

Sheridan Nurseries began as a solution to a designer’s problem. In 1911 two young British landscape architects, Lorrie Dunington and Howard Grubb, married, joined their surnames as Dunington-Grubb and emigrated to Canada, according to a centenary history published by the trade association Landscape Ontario in June 2013. They opened a landscape architecture office in Toronto, but found few ornamental trees, shrubs or perennials to plant in their designs; the Ontario nurseries of the day, that history says, mostly grew fruit trees around Niagara.

So they grew their own. In 1913 they bought 100 acres near the hamlet of Sheridan, now part of Oakville, Ontario. English Wikipedia adds that only about 20 of those acres proved suitable for ornamental plants. To run the nursery while they kept designing, the couple advertised in the Gardeners’ Chronicle in London for a foreman. The reply came from Herman Stensson, a horticulturist who, Landscape Ontario says, was raised in Denmark and was then working at Kew Gardens. He arrived with his wife and four young sons in March 1914; the company gives “the spring of 1914.”

The first catalogue appeared in the autumn of 1914, the company says, listing 80 herbaceous perennials, 29 shrubs, 12 trees and four climbers, with an article explaining hardy perennials to Canadian amateur gardeners. The nursery reached 250 acres by 1926, according to both the company and English Wikipedia, and 300 acres under production by 1930, according to Landscape Ontario. In 1923 Stensson returned to Europe to recruit trained nurserymen, and a number of Danes joined the company.

The founders kept their design practice. Landscape Ontario credits the Dunington-Grubbs with gardens including Parkwood in Oshawa and the Oakes Garden Theatre and Rainbow Gardens in Niagara Falls, and with the planting of University Avenue in Toronto in 1964.

Hardy plants and sales stations.

Much of Sheridan’s reputation rests on plants bred or selected for Ontario winters. English Wikipedia says the nursery obtained seed of the hardy Korean boxwood in 1922 and first listed it in its catalogue in 1939; the company says it brought the first boxwood into Ontario from Korea and the first Japanese yew seed from Japan in the 1920s. From the late 1960s, English Wikipedia says, Sheridan bred hardy hedging boxwoods by crossing the common box with a hardier Asian species. The company lists its introductions as including Green Velvet and Green Mountain boxwood, the Ivory Silk lilac tree and the Mountbatten juniper.

Retail came early. The first seasonal garden centres, which the company calls “sales stations,” opened in the early 1920s, one near Yonge and Bloor in Toronto and one on Southdown Road in Mississauga. Landscape Ontario lists further stations at Clarkson in 1923 and Montreal in 1925, and later garden centres on Yonge Street, at Unionville in 1967 and at Kitchener in 1978; it dates the Yonge Street centre to 1952, while the company gives 1950. The company says the Southdown Road site still operates as one of the largest combined retail and trade garden centres in Canada.

The war years are part of the record. During the Second World War, Landscape Ontario wrote in 2013, Sheridan hired many of the Japanese Canadians who had been forced out of British Columbia, and some stayed with the company for more than 40 years; it also hired young women, known as “Farmerettes,” for summer fieldwork. English Wikipedia, citing a 2011 report in Mississauga.com, says the company hired 22 Japanese-Canadian internees in 1943 and that its records show they were paid employees, at a lower hourly rate than other workers.

The land grew with the business. Landscape Ontario records nurseries at Sherway in Etobicoke from the late 1930s and close to 1,000 acres near Georgetown acquired in the 1950s and 1960s, now the site of the head office.

Garden centres and their owners.

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.

A family-run grower and retailer.

Sheridan has been run for most of its history by the Stensson family. Landscape Ontario records that Herman Stensson’s eldest son, J.V. (Bill) Stensson, a Harvard-trained landscape architect, became nursery manager in 1938, and that another son, Howard, later became president, serving from 1972 until he retired in 1992. In its 2013 centenary history it named Bill Stensson, Howard’s son, as chief executive and Karl Stensson as president. English Wikipedia says three of Herman Stensson’s grandchildren were senior managers in 2010.

In 2003 Sheridan bought the Weall and Cullen chain of garden centres, according to both Landscape Ontario and the company, which says that purchase is the origin of its centres in Whitby, Scarborough and Etobicoke. English Wikipedia says the company won the International Grower of the Year award from the International Association of Horticultural Producers in 2012, and it marked its centenary in 2013; that year the Landscape Ontario history described it as Canada’s largest combined garden centre retailer and grower.

Today the company describes itself as a grower, wholesaler and retailer of plants, garden supplies, patio furniture and home decor. Its website lists eight garden centres, in Aurora, Etobicoke, Georgetown, Kitchener, Mississauga, Scarborough, Toronto and Whitby, and says its farms at Glen Williams and Norval, about 50 kilometres north-west of Toronto, cover more than 900 acres, grow more than 1,200 cultivars and ship plants across north-eastern North America. Among the awards it lists are Canada’s Greenest Employers for 2016 to 2023 and a national Garden Centre of the Year award in 2015 for its Etobicoke centre.

For a design guide, Sheridan Nurseries shows how a grower’s identity can rest on its own plant introductions and a century of catalogues. Compare Armstrong Garden Centers, a Californian chain, and Calloway’s, a Texan garden-centre chain. For this guide we use a boxwood green, a deep hedge green, cream and an ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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