A home business that grew into a catalogue.

Veseys began in York, a rural community on Prince Edward Island, in 1939. Fruit & Vegetable Magazine, in a profile by Kathy Birt published in February 2008, said the business was founded that year by Arthur Vesey, and that it was long run from his own house: in the 1950s the seed business was attached to the family home, with its office in a small space off the living quarters.

The catalogue was there from the beginning. The same profile said Vesey’s Seeds started with seeds only and with a catalogue from the start, and that mail order remained the backbone of the company. It described a print run that had grown many times over since the early years, and said the business had added staff and a toll-free call centre as it modernised. The first expansion of the premises, the magazine reported, came in 1965.

The name has been written in two ways. The 2008 profile used the possessive form, Vesey’s Seeds, while CBC News reports from 2016 and 2017 use Veseys Seeds, without the apostrophe. Both refer to the same business in York.

The company stayed in its home community. CBC News has described it as based in York, P.E.I., in each of its reports, and its people have spoken for it from the island in national stories about gardening, tulips and wildflower seed.

How the business passed to the Simpson family.

The Simpson family bought Veseys in 1979. Fruit & Vegetable Magazine reported in 2008 that B.E. “Bev” Simpson joined the company in 1956, planning to stay for a year, became a partner less than ten years later and bought Vesey’s Seeds in 1979. At the time of the profile he was president, with his wife Shirley semi-retired from the business and his son Gerry serving as vice-president.

The purchase was followed by a narrowing of the business. The same report said that shortly after buying it, Simpson sold the vegetable production side to the Dykerman family, who run Brookfield Gardens, leaving Veseys to concentrate on seed and the catalogue trade.

Family ownership has been part of how the company describes itself. In March 2017, during a promotion that put its wildflower seed in front of many new customers, John Barrett, Veseys’ director of sales, marketing and development, told CBC News that the company was dealing with rumours that it was owned by Monsanto, “when in fact it’s always been a family, Island-owned company.” In the same interview he said Veseys does not sell any genetically modified seed, that it had signed a safe seed pledge and that it complies with the seed purity requirements of the Canada Seeds Act.

That promotion was a partnership with General Mills. CBC News reported that Honey Nut Cheerios boxes across North America carried the Bring Back the Bees campaign, which offered free packets of Veseys wildflower seed to encourage people to plant for pollinators; it was the second year of the promotion in Canada and the first in the United States, and Barrett said demand had run well ahead of what the company expected.

A catalogue house on an island.

The seven brands in this group are all garden seed names: D.T. Brown, Moles Seeds, Franchi, De Bolster, Veseys, Seeds of Change and True Leaf Market. Seed companies in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger horticultural groups, and a single name can reach gardeners through a printed catalogue, a garden-centre rack or a website.

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

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

Tulips and a country’s birthday.

Some of Veseys’ public projects have used bulbs rather than seed. In October 2016 CBC News reported that the company was donating red and white tulip bulbs to communities across Canada, to be planted that autumn so they would bloom in the spring of 2017 for the country’s 150th birthday. Barrett told CBC that the tulip gardens would instil a love of gardening and that people would think of Canada’s birthday when they saw them, and “possibly, they might think of us too.”

The 2016 report also said Veseys had run a similar project the year before, in 2015, to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and Canada’s part in the liberation of the Netherlands.

The wildflower campaign showed the other side of a mail-order brand. With the company’s name in front of a cereal-box audience, CBC News reported, Veseys spent the spring of 2017 answering questions about invasive species and genetic modification, and Barrett explained in plain terms that most species in the mix would be non-native but not invasive. To be invasive, he said, a species has to be non-native and tend to spread in a way that threatens the environmental, economic or social health of an area; some species in the mix could become naturalised without harming the environment. The rush also came at an awkward moment. Barrett noted that early spring is already a very busy season for Veseys, telling CBC that it was “not the ideal time to get a massive reorder like that, but we’re dealing with it.”

For a design guide, Veseys shows how a regional seed house can turn a place, a family and a catalogue into its identity, alongside public planting projects. Compare D.T. Brown and Moles Seeds, two other seed houses in this group. For this guide we use island red, catalogue paper and a field-green accent with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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