From Plant Stand to Retail Garden Center: Behnke’s Largo Story

Stephanie usually writes about Behnke’s at Beltsville. I thought I would do a “shout out” to the retail store that we had at Largo, MD, which opened full-time in the spring of 1985 and closed in around 2008, when the property was sold to the First Baptist Church of Glenarden that is next door to where the Behnke property lay adjacent to Watkins Park Drive. Largo Retail was a small part of a 70 acre property that was primarily devoted to growing annuals, perennials, and woody plants for sale at the Behnke retail sites. My recollection is that they were looking to add a school and parking to the church grounds. We demolished most of the buildings before we vacated the land.

Looking at Google Maps now, the warehouse that Behnke’s had is still standing. The three large annual and poinsettia production greenhouses surrounded the warehouse. The paved areas that held these greenhouses and the retail store area that was closer to the front entrance of the property have been converted to parking, and the former outdoor growing areas for trees and shrubs in the rear are now home to a solar energy farm.

When I started at Behnke’s, it was in March of 1984 at Largo Retail. They had been running it as a seasonal “plant stand,” selling garden mums in the fall and annuals and perennials in the spring. When I started as “manager” with a staff of me, the decision had been made to expand the offerings to include some hardgoods in a little shed which was adjacent to two small greenhouses, and to expand the shrub and perennial offerings. We even got two each of about a dozen varieties of trees. A bell with a rope was installed on a 4X4 timber, and the idea was that, if a customer drifted in, they would ring the bell and I would come up from the adjacent perennial growing areas, where I would be weeding between sales. We ran seven days a week from about April 1 to the middle of June. Al and Helen Gardiner came from Beltsville to set up the tiny Garden Shop of hardgoods for me, and Mike Bader served as my liaison with Beltsville. I worked six days a week, and on Thursdays, I believe that June Dan came down from Beltsville woody plant department to run the stand.

It turned out to be busy enough that I spent most of my time in the retail store (I always hated weeding), and it showed enough promise that we opened full time the next spring, with Karen Upton and I as co-managers of a very small staff. As I recall it, that first year Karen ran the registers and the houseplants, I did woody plants and perennials, and Mary Claire Walker stocked and sold the annuals. We all did different bits of the garden shop. As sales increased we added staff over the years, and Karen and I moved to other jobs at Behnke’s. Mary Claire has been at Patuxent Nursery for many years. Other long-time Behnke folks that spent time at Largo Retail included Alex Dencker, Christopher Lewis, Orion Taylor, Reada Robinson, Lori Bristow, James Dronenburg, and Jim O’Hara.

There were hundreds of others that don’t immediately spring to a mind that isn’t wound as tightly as it used to be. I’m sure that when Stephanie is at her weekend craft shows around the state, people come up to her and say: “I used to work at Behnke’s, down at the Largo location.”

The photo was taken May 1, 2000. It was from a roll of slide film, and the developer (United Photo, of Beltsville) gave us a digital copy of each slide, probably on a floppy disc. This was very exciting at the time, my first-ever digital photo experience.