Get to know Brent Markus

After a few years of that, I don’t want to say I got bored with it, but I was ready (laughs). At this point, I ‘d been with Cornell for eight years. I was there during the school year, and in the summers, I was designing gardens in the greater Chicago area, some roof decks in the city, but mostly suburban landscapes with the focus on a four-season garden approach. I was still utilizing and experimenting with hundreds of different Japanese maple and dwarf conifer gardens. I was kind of using my customers' gardens as test grounds for whether it was a new Japanese maple cultivar or a cool new conifer that I hadn't seen planted elsewhere, and in the process of doing one of the landscapes, I flew out to Oregon, I was purchasing and hand selecting a lot of different plants for a garden. One of the nurseries I was buying stuff from mentioned that they we’re going out of business and losing the land lease in a year. and I inquired, ‘what’s going to happen with all your product?’ They said, ‘honestly, we don't know.’ A week later I dove in headfirst, and I made an offer on purchasing the remaining inventory and hired the proprietor as my nursery manager. That was 2007. I was still at Cornell, but also supporting an operation out in Oregan as well. For the first few years. I was just building up numbers and building up stock plants, trying to buy cool new varieties from all over. I had permission to take cuttings from lots of incredible collections, so I was sending cuttings to graft to Oregon throughout the winter from awesome gardens on the East coast from collectors that I've been friends with for ten plus years, including gardens at Cornell and other amazing private gardens.  

From 2007 – 2010, I built up this amazing stock of cool new varieties, but that was the same time of the housing crisis, and nurseries were just imploding left and right. Some of the biggest nurseries in Oregon were going out of business, and at the same time I was trying to launch a new operation. So, it was very difficult to gain a new customer. I had plant material, but I didn’t have many buyers for it. Slowly, I gained a tiny bit of market share, but while I’m trying to sell plant material from Rare Tree Nursery, the trucks were being filled with green giants or emerald greens. Then they’d say, ‘Oh, we’ve got three feet at the tail for your plant material, Brent.’ So, while I’m watching thousands of hedge plants of all this more common bread and butter varieties shipped to Oregon, they’d say, ‘oh, we’ll take five twombly's red sentinel, five mikawa yatsubusa Japanese maples, and a few of those cool conifers just some color to spice up the garden center.’ … It was a little depressing (laughs). The volumes were down, and more than five feet on a truck were so few and far between. I asked myself what am I doing wrong? I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and the reality was that a lot of these cool new varieties were not used in the quantities that the basics are used.  

I continued on the path of improving our quality and availability, making no money whatsoever, just constantly reinvesting, trying to keep the business viable. Then I took a trip to Europe in 2012. I toured mostly to see their conifer production and what varieties were popular in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is the nursery central for all of Europe. Technologically they are so far ahead of what we’re doing in the U.S. with equipment, labor efficiency, everything. It was a mind-blowing trip, but besides what I learned from conifer and maple production, I stopped into a nursery called QuickHedge. They were basically maintaining 35 miles of hedge with seven employees. It was the polar opposite of how my operations were run. Rare Tree Nursery even to this day, most plants are touched 5, 6, 7, 8 times before they end up being shipped or go onto a truck to an end user. … Here, they had over a half million plants in production as finished hedges with so few employees because they were just utilizing equipment to the max – GPS control tractors, custom implements. They were performing these tasks to create gorgeous, finished hedges. It really pivoted my entire thought process. I didn’t have the land with Rare Tree to just dive in and start creating finished hedges. I needed a much bigger plot, a tremendous number of seedlings and rooted cuttings, so it wasn't something that I could just pivot into within weeks. After thinking about the business model for a few months, I decided ‘you know what, I'm young enough. I'm just going to dive in headfirst and try this out.’   

At the end of 2012, I pivoted some of my production to produce my own liners for eventually finding a property and launching a finished hedge company. It took about 18 months, but after 18 months, I had around 45,000 plants that were ready to go into the ground, found a beautiful piece of property and a friendly investor. That was the birth of InstantHedge. Our first crops went in the ground in the summer of 2014. Our first sales for one or two varieties started in 2019, but really 2020 was our launch year, which coinciding with COVID and the canceling of a lot of tradeshows made that a little difficult, but Since launch, we're shipping a lot of hedges. We had over 3,000 linear feet shipped to an estate in New York to create an insane hedge maze. We supplied over 2,000 Linear feet of boxwood hedges to an amusement park in New England. We've also shipped a tremendous number of smaller orders that are going to residents, hotels and balconies throughout the U.S., so the diversity of projects that we've been able to supply to over the last three years is pretty incredible. 

NM: What is your favorite part of your job?