Now Where Is She?

As you are reading this, I am in one of my very favorite places. The AmericasMart in Atlanta, Georgia. After we closed the garden center last summer, I thought I would never get to go back to this magical place. A place where buyers from all over the world come to see what is new and exciting. For me, I would go in January and buy for the following Christmas season. Besides having Christmas, you could walk throughout 4 buildings that were all connected, each with 20 floors of wholesalers offering everything. Whatever you see in a retail store, you can bet it is at this show.

At this point, you might be asking why I am back down here? Some of you have already visited our online shopping experience. When we closed the nursery, I decided that I wanted to look more into offering different home decor and gardening items to you. So far, we have a few different companies that we are working with that have some beautiful things, but I wanted to find more unique gifts. Plus, learn more about online sales while I am at it.

I have been fortunate that our webmaster, Larry Bristow, has been helping me with setting everything up. This way, we know we are making a great shopping experience for you. We are both pretty excited about these new opportunities that we have been exploring. For Larry, he is working on building web sites for businesses, and for me, I am following my, dare I say, passion? I heard that ‘you don’t FIND your passion, you MAKE your passion.’ Well, I am passionate about somehow keeping the Behnke web site going along with our email/blog as long as you are interested. But I can’t just sit back and hope it finds me, I have to go out and make it happen.

For me, by writing about gardening and other independent garden centers, I feel somehow connected in a small way with everyone that loves plants and nature as I do. I love sharing things that I find important or once in a while about my family. Better still is when I get responses from you about your passions, your family, and of course, your yards.

So stay tuned. If you’re into Instagram, watch for some postings as I find different things to add to our shopping cart and let me know your thoughts about our online shopping.

By Stephanie Fleming, Beyond Behnke’s

Stephanie Fleming

Stephanie Fleming was raised at Behnke’s Nurseries in Beltsville. Her Mom, Sonja, was one of Albert & Rose Behnke’s four children. She was weeding from the moment she could walk and hiding as soon as she was old enough to run, so many weeds, so little time. Although she quickly learned how to pull out a perennial and get taken off of weed pulling duty.