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Jeff and Henry have been working with plants all their lives. They grew up on a farm in Westport, Conn., that had been in their mother's family for generations. From the time they were 9 or 10 years old, they helped out in the greenhouses and gardens or at a roadside stand, where Jon and Eleanor sold fruits, vegetables and bedding plants grown on the farm, as well as produce supplied by other growers in the area. "When they were young, they were expected to work. I always believed that if you had children involved in your business, you had to give them responsibilities. They had to really be partners in it," Jon says.

GREEN THUMBS: Pleasant View employees tend to the display gardens in Loudon, N.H.

Even as a boy, Jeff loved growing things. "I always knew I wanted to be a farmer," he says. Henry wasn't so keen on the production side of the business, but he did enjoy working with customers and thinking about ways to offer more products, increase sales and do things more efficiently. Both of them feel fortunate to have been able to work alongside their parents and credit them with the success they have achieved at Pleasant View. "My parents have always led by example," Henry observes. "They taught us the value of hard work and the payoff that comes with it. They always encouraged us to make our own decisions, good or bad."

When the Huntingtons purchased Pleasant View in 1976, the nursery had just two small greenhouses and a handful of employees growing foliage plants for flower shops. People of a certain age might remember that the '70s were festooned with ferns, ficus and philodendrons. Many restaurants and offices, as well as homes, looked like mini-rainforest ecosystems. "There were flower shops or plant stores on every corner back then. Everybody was selling green plants," Jon recalls. "I could see a real opportunity there."

Jon's plan was to expand both the selection of products offered by the nursery and the geographic range of its market. "When I had the roadside market in Connecticut, I used to go into New York and buy every conceivable fruit and vegetable—stuff no one else had," he recalls. Customers would come from far afield to shop at a market where they knew they would find both quality and novelty. Jon thought he could grow his new business the same way: by offering varieties of foliage plants that had never before been available to flower shops in the area. "The vision was to create a kind of Boston Market in foliage plants for northern New England," he explains.

The new business started off strong. The market for foliage plants was as good as Jon had hoped, and the Huntingtons started broadening their product line to include annual flowers and potted plants. But just as they were getting established, the future of their business was threatened by an unanticipated jump in energy prices. Jon recalls watching the price of heating oil soar from 17 cents a gallon to $1.17 in the late '70s. "We were burning $1,000 a night, and our business was just starting to grow," he says. "We had some tough years."

The oil crisis was a wake-up call for the whole industry, Jeff observes. "A lot of people don't like to change, but we had no choice. We had to become more efficient." In Europe, where labor costs were considerably higher, greenhouse growers were already using new technology to lower the cost of production, but the Huntingtons were among the first to bring that technology to the United States. They imported seeding machines and automatic pot fillers and started growing annuals in cell packs, increasing the speed of production by 10 to 20 times. Their sales of annuals began to take off, outstripping the foliage business.

At the same time, the Huntingtons were restructuring the way they worked with customers. "In the early years, 95 percent of our customers would drive out to Pleasant View, pick out the plants they wanted, get a handwritten sales receipt and drive away," Jeff says. As sales volume increased and the nursery operation became more complicated, they could no longer have customers showing up at random and wandering through the greenhouses. They started handling sales over the phone—and later over the Internet—and shipping orders by truck.

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