Bigger isn’t always better

Brian Williams loves big plants. When he started breeding, his goal was to create the biggest, most outrageous, over-the-top plants he could. However, once he realized that not everyone wants 15-foot-tall plants in their backyard, his business started to grow like one of his monster alocasias.

“I like the idea of making something that nobody’s seen before,” Williams says. “Boxwoods never excited me too much.”
 

From a collector to a breeder

Although he comes from a family of plantsmen, Williams took a roundabout route to becoming a breeder and running a nursery. It all started with turtles. As a child, Williams built a pond for his pet turtles. He used aquatic and tropical plants to create a natural habitat for them.

“Eventually I had fewer and fewer turtles and more and more plants,” he says.

His interest in tropical plants is rooted in a lack of patience. His father grew palm trees, and Williams didn’t like how long it took them to grow. That’s not a problem with quick growers like Colocasia gigantea, which can grow from a 4-inch plant to an 8-foot specimen in five months.

“By the time one of my new hybrids hits the market, I’m already on to something new,” he says. “It keeps me motivated.”

Williams approaches plants with the zeal of a collector. As a child, he collected rocks, then baseball cards, before moving on to plants.

“Each time, I got bored to death of it because when you reach a certain point, it seems like there’s not much more you can do,” he says. “I had a huge rock collection, but once you’ve got every rock you can imagine, all you can do is sit around and look at them. With the plants, there were always endless possibilities. I could combine this with that. It’s kept me from getting bored with it.”

When he was a teenager, Williams would scour botanical gardens for rare and unusual plants to add to his collection. He spent years hunting them down, and realized that no one was selling the plants he wanted. That was what originally compelled him to turn his hobby into a business. But it was a business with a problem. Williams realized why no one was selling those plants.

“Very few people can offer the environment those plants need,” Williams says. “So when that started happening, I decided I would breed plants that look like those plants but are easy to grow.”

One of the major breeding challenges Williams faced was hardiness. The lush tropical plants he loved weren’t tough enough for Kentucky’s Zone 6 winters, or even the Zone 8 of most of the Southeast United States. So he had to get creative.

“Usually when I’m breeding something, I like to look for extremes — the most cold-hardy variety of a certain species and most beautiful, exotic form,” he says. “Then, I’ll try to bring them together to make one that’s got the color and also the toughness.”

An example is Alocasia ‘Mayan Mask,’ which Williams bred with a species called amazonica. ‘Mayan Mask’ has large green leaves with white veins and purple undersides. The edges of the leaves have a wave ruffling and the stems are dark green. It grows to 6 feet tall and can be used outdoors as a container or landscape plant in Zone 8.

“An alocasia like that never would have been seen in a landscape in Louisiana or South Carolina,” he says. “But I bred it with the hardiest and easiest to grow varieties and continued until I got it to a point where it does look like the indoor plant, but it has the genetics to help it survive outdoors.”

There is a lot of trial and selection work that precedes production. Once a selection finally makes the cut, it is sent to Florida tissue culture lab AG 3. The lab cleans any viruses, and from there, the plant can go into mass production. When Williams sees the first tray, he decides whether or not to apply for a trademark and a patent. The royalties help fund future breeding projects. Plants Nouveau is the nursery’s agent and represents Williams’ new plants in the trade.
 

Finding a market

Brian’s Botanicals’ transition from a hobby to a successful business owes a lot to the efforts of Brian’s fiancée, Sarah Waddell. Williams says she has helped him focus on more marketable types of plants. Williams specializes in aroids, but has expanded into hardy tropical trees and shrubs, succulents, and terrarium plants.

“Before, when I would breed a canna, I’d breed for size,” he says. “I’d make it big and over the top. But she’d say, ‘This dwarf canna with pink flowers is nice.’ I would have overlooked it a hundred times. But it really has marketable aspects to it that I was blind to at one point.”

Williams says his ‘Punch’ series of cannas is one of his best sellers. The bright green leaves of ‘Maui Punch’ show off radiant yellow flowers covered with reddish-orange spots. ‘Lemon Punch’ has sturdy, bluish-green leaves and complementary bright, citrine-yellow flowers.

“Canna ‘Maui Punch’ is the best spotted flower I’ve ever seen on a dwarf canna,” Williams says. “It’s self-cleaning and it’s one of those plants that as soon as they flower for me, they’re gone. I’ve always sold out of it every time I’ve released it. Most people see it and say, ‘Oh, PhotoShop.’ Then they grow it. A lot of times my customers come in and pull out their phones, show me photos of their backyard with their ‘Maui Punch’ plants flowering.”

It’s probably not a surprise, but Williams’ exotic plants attract an atypical customer. Many of the customers who buy Williams’ plants are younger men.

“I hear ‘these people are old gardeners, all they want is roses,’ but I get a lot of younger people with the tropical plants. It’s a lot of guys who I call weekend warriors. They have swimming pools, active lifestyles, with barbeques and want their backyard to look like a Hawaiian hotel getaway.”

Williams says there are whole groups of these “weekend warriors” that engage in a friendly competition to see who has the best backyard.

“When they’ve got the tiki torches and barbeques going, for some of them, it looks like a resort,” he says. “It’s better than mine. I get jealous.”

Photography by Meg Magsig