A plant food from a packing company.

Vigoro began as a plant food sold by Swift & Company. A 1926 catalogue from the Washington, D.C., seed and garden house Balderson & Hayden, preserved in the Internet Archive’s collection of seed catalogues, offers Vigoro with copy explaining that it “remained for Swift & Company” to formulate a plant food specially prepared for growing plants. The listing sets out the product’s uses under four headings — lawns, flowers, gardens and shrubbery — with the brand name printed in capitals throughout, and offers it in bags of several sizes.

Swift kept the name for decades and built on it. The golf-industry magazine Golfdom reported in January 1953 that Swift & Co.’s Plant Food Division had announced Instant Vigoro, a water-soluble plant food developed by Swift’s research organisation as a companion product to regular Vigoro, for golf courses and others. The magazine said it would be packed in cans of several sizes and in bags, and described it, like the original, as a complete plant food.

Later labels show where the business sat. A Vigoro product label filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and dated October 1970 names the manufacturer as Swift Agricultural Chemicals Corporation of Chicago, and tells customers to write to Vigoro at a Chicago post-office box.

By the early 1990s Vigoro was the name of the company as well as the product. An EPA file dated January 1993 is a certification from Vigoro Industries, Inc., of Fairview Heights, Illinois, concerning a lawn product that still carried the older name: Swift’s Lawn Weeder and Feeder.

Vigoro Corp., IMC, Pursell and United Industries.

The company that took the brand’s name was a fertilizer producer as well as a consumer marketer. The Los Angeles Times described it in November 1995 as Chicago-based Vigoro, a producer of potash, nitrogen and other fertilizer ingredients with mines in Saskatchewan and the United States, which also sold fertilizer and other products at retail stores located mainly in the Midwest. The newspaper was reporting that Vigoro had agreed to merge with IMC, a fertilizer company based in Northbrook, Illinois, which produced phosphates and mined potash.

English Wikipedia’s article on IMC Global says IMC completed the acquisition of Chicago-based Vigoro Corp. in early 1996. The same article says IMC Global combined with Cargill’s crop nutrition business in 2004 to form The Mosaic Company. By then the consumer Vigoro line had already moved on to a lawn-and-garden company.

The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on United Industries Corporation of St. Louis, records that in late 2001 United Industries acquired several consumer fertilizer lines from Pursell Industries, among them Vigoro, Sta-Green and Bandini. The directory presents the purchase as the start of a move by United Industries beyond insect control into lawn and garden products. The same entry lists brands the company had gathered earlier: Spectracide and Hot Shot, taken from Chesebrough-Pond’s, and the Cutter insect repellent, bought from Miles Laboratories. It says the company’s home and garden division was by then operating under the Spectrum Brands name.

Today the name is tied to a retailer. A Vigoro weed-and-feed label held in Washington State University’s PICOL pesticide-label database states that Vigoro is a trademark of Home Depot. The label names the manufacturer as Lebanon Seaboard Corporation of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, carries a “Made in the U.S.A.” line and points customers to a Home Depot garden club website.

Design and documentation.

Lawn-care and household pest-control brands sit on garden-centre shelves, in hardware aisles and under kitchen sinks, and they reach shoppers through packs more than through advertising. A fertiliser bag, a shaker of garden dust, an aerosol of insect repellent and a card of bait stations all have to name the product, say what it is for and carry required label text, often within a small space and alongside rival packs.

Many of these names have changed hands more than once, passing from the chemical or consumer-goods companies that started them to other groups, so the name on a pack can be older than the company that now owns it. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packs and marks have changed over time.

Each guide sets out what independent, dated sources record and what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its packs have looked — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. Products are described by name and category only.

One word carried from a catalogue page to a retailer’s label.

Vigoro’s identity rests on its name rather than on any single owner. The word appears on a Swift plant food in a 1926 catalogue and on a Home Depot trademark notice on a current label; between those points it passed through Swift’s agricultural chemicals business, Vigoro Industries and Vigoro Corp., IMC, Pursell Industries and United Industries.

The early presentation was the plain style of the seed-catalogue page. In the 1926 Balderson & Hayden listing, the product name is set in capitals at the head of each paragraph — lawns, flowers, gardens, shrubbery — so that a reader scanning the page meets VIGORO again and again. Swift’s own name sat alongside it as the maker, and the Swift name stayed on lawn products into the 1990s, as the Vigoro Industries certification for Swift’s Lawn Weeder and Feeder shows.

The later Vigoro label has to carry more than a name. Weed-and-feed products sold in the United States are registered pesticides, so the label combines the brand panel with directions for use, precautionary statements, a guaranteed-analysis panel, the manufacturer’s name and a trademark notice. On the label in the PICOL database, those required panels sit beside the Vigoro name and a line stating that Vigoro is a trademark of Home Depot.

The 1953 Golfdom notice shows the other habit of the name: extension. Instant Vigoro was presented as a companion to regular Vigoro rather than as a new brand, and the Vigoro name was attached to a new product form while the original kept its place.

For a design guide, Vigoro shows how a short product name can outlast the companies behind it and end up held by a retailer, with the manufacturer named in small type on the back of the bag. Compare it with Spectracide, its stablemate at United Industries, and Scotts, another American lawn brand with a long record. For this guide we use prairie green and stockyard brick on granule cream with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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