About the Owner
My name is Glenn Bates and I have been in the gardening/landscaping business, in one way or another, for almost the last twenty-five years.
I have been growing plants since I could walk. My mother talks about how I would break limbs off of trees and plant them in the ground to see if they would grow. Ever since I have been able to read, I have been collecting books on growing plants. If I can't answer a question someone has about plants, I can look it up. I have the resources.
Unlike most high school students, I didn't hold a part-time job working for someone else. I was self-employed, earning income in gardening. I convinced my parents to let me build a greenhouse in the back yard in 1983 and began selling hanging baskets (mostly ferns), bedding plants, and any other type of plants that I could grow and sell.
I received my degree in Ornamental Horticulture and Landscape Design from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1989. After graduation, I worked for four different nurseries/landscapers over the next year and a half. After that, I started doing landscaping on my own as well as operating a small nursery, at my home, located on a major highway.
One day, the mother of one of my friends asked me if I could build a water garden for her and I told her I would try. I purchased several books and asked a lot of questions of people in the business and built her pond. Since then, I have built over 30 other water gardens and changed the focus of my local retail nursery to strictly water garden plants. I also stock and sell fish for water gardens at my nursery. Non-pond plants are now offered mailorder, only at my website. I will also be offering pond plants, mostly to the wholesale trade.