Boynton’s Greenhouses

Always Something New at Boynton’s | March 2019
By Maria Landry

Scents of fresh earth and springtime permeate the warm greenhouses filled with growing plants at Boynton’s on Madison Avenue.

“It’s something different every day,” Boynton’s General Manager Ellen Withee says of her work.

According to Withee—whose grandparents Robert and Doris Boynton started the business in 1952, and whose parents, Marcia and Lee Granville, took it over in the ’70s—life at Boynton’s is never boring.

“I’ve been working here since ’83,” she said, noting that her mother still owns the business. “I love seeing all our returning customers—we know a lot of our customers by name. I love working in the greenhouses, especially this time of year when we’re doing all the transplanting. It’s nice to be able to be a little creative. I do a lot of paperwork, but I also get to play with flowers and grow plants.”

The flower shop is a year-round business offering everyday flower needs plus flowers for weddings, funerals, and other events. In the summer, Boynton’s does about two weddings a week.

“Some days it’s really intense working in the flower shop,” Withee commented.

With five greenhouses, the garden center is open from May to August and features vegetables and herbs, perennials, hanging baskets, shrubs, ornamentals and rose bushes, blueberry and raspberry bushes, and much more.

“In March we start getting all our little seedlings that we start planting and growing,” Withee said. “Most of the vegetables we start from seeds, and we buy little plugs for a lot of our major crops like geraniums and petunias.”

Boynton’s grows a lot of their own cut flowers during the warmer months. “It’s something we’re expanding on,” Withee said. “We only can do it a few months a year, June to October, but it’s great when we can. We grow the best sunflowers around, plus other things like zinnias, asters, statice, and lisianthus.”

Withee noted that there’s always something new in the gardening world, from new methods to new varieties.

“Just like fashions change, the popularity of flowers and styles change, so we have to keep up with that,” she said. “We don’t ever want to get static and stay the same. I remember 10 years ago, we started getting green flowers—not artificially dyed ones, but natural ones—and we thought, ‘That is so weird… Who would want a green flower?’ And now they’re really popular, and we like them. You just never know.”

Today, Withee says, there are innumerable color options for flowers, but it wasn’t always that way. “It used to be that if you wanted a lot of different colors in flowers—I’m talking the bad old days—you had to spray paint them. Yuck! But now there are so many different varieties, it’s unbelievable.”

Vase life has vastly improved too. “It used to be that flowers just didn’t last that long. Now we get our flowers farm to refrigerator really quickly, and they last a lot longer. People tell us all the time that their flowers last two or three weeks.”

In addition to fresh flowers, plants, vegetables, and herbs, Boynton’s also offers a variety of gifts available in the flower shop.

“I like to get local things and things that are related to flowers and nature,” Withee said.

Among many other items, she carries dried-flower pictures that are made by someone who lives in Harmony and a line of lotion called Mooed in Maine, crafted in Athens using milk from a local cow farm.

“We also have the farmers’ market here in the wintertime,” she noted. “From November to April, they come every other week. It’s really nice. It’s a good way to have some activity in the greenhouse in the winter.”

With the business open six days a week in the slower season and seven days during the busiest months of the year, Withee spends a lot of time at Boynton’s.

“People ask, ‘Do you get sick of flowers?’” she said. “I don’t. I bring home old flowers all the time. I love annuals because they’re always colorful. I have several perennial beds, two big gardens in front of my steps, and pots everywhere. Once I get home, we sit on the deck, I might pinch deadheads off geraniums, we listen to the birds—it’s great. I can’t get enough of it.”

To learn more, visit Boynton’s website and Facebook page.