James Cullum
The path to gardening success for the owner of Greenstreet Gardens began in Highland, Md. in Howard County. “It was out in the country back then,” he said. “We always had a huge garden — a monstrous garden. My mom’s a huge gardener. Loves her roses.”
He talked about his days growing up in Maryland while giving a tour of his business at 1721 W. Braddock Road just days before making some major changes.
Ray Greenstreet moved his Del Ray store to a new garden center in Belle Haven at 5905 Richmond Highway, where his team plans to add events like live music and food trucks. “We love Del Ray, it was just too tight,” he said. “It was a cute, great place, but just a little too hard to operate.”
In the springtime at its peak, the nursery business, with its Maryland and Northern Virginia locations, has about 165 employees. With Alexandria’s low unemployment rate, it’s sometimes tough to expand the staff, he said.
“We’ve tried to tap into people who have had other careers — we’ve had people who used to be in the military or lobbyists whose passion is gardening and some have their master gardener certificates.”
Greenstreet bought the West Braddock location in 2012 as he looked for new sites to diversify their Maryland business.
“In Alexandria, there’s such a diversity of housing — we’ve got apartments and condos, townhouses and then we have estates,” he said. “You really kind of have that A to Z. We have to have the same plant in multiple sizes, so Old Town might have window boxes, things like that.”
“Another thing that is cool about this area is there’s a diversity of people from different parts of the world and they like different kinds of plants,” he said.
It’s traditional too — one of the most popular plants is the geranium.
Greenstreet says his team focuses on educating people when they purchase plants.
“We try to give them the ABCs on how to garden. Our motto is, ‘Success Grows Here.’ And I truly believe that. If you’re going to buy a couple-dollar tomato plant or a hundred-dollar tree, we want to be sure you’re successful.”
Greenstreet still shows an enthusiasm for the business that began when he was 13 years old. That’s when he started working for a wholesale greenhouse grower. “I needed a job, I started out as a yard boy,” he said. He drove the business owner’s wife, who had polio, around the grounds in a cart. “She would show me the flowers she wanted to plant.”
The company had 50-plus greenhouses and he worked there throughout high school. It supplied plants to Giant grocery stores and all the big-box stores. He took a year off before entering college, working for Creative Plantings (“back in the ‘80s when all the ‘interiorscape’ was huge”) before heading to Chicago to study horticulture at the College of DuPage. The school encouraged students to learn on the job by doing a month of internship followed by a month of study.
After college, he went to work for Bell Nursery and Creative Plantings, servicing offices and shopping malls’ needs for plantings, and then he went to work as a sales rep for Ball Seed, where he worked in Maryland for a couple of years.
Then he accepted a new territory, and his wife, Stacy, and first son moved to Long Island, N.Y. “We fell in love with New York and the Hamptons and it was a great place to work and learn business, but I promised my wife I’d bring her back to Maryland one day.”
The family returned to Maryland several years later, in 2001, after they had an opportunity to purchase a farm in Lothian in Anne Arundel County, where they currently live on 65 acres with six acres of greenhouses. The family now includes children Ryan, Seth and Abigail.
Greenstreet encounters a number of people who don’t think they have a green thumb at all.
“I believe gardening for most people, should be like a recipe card, like baking a cake: Two eggs, a cup of flour, a cup of milk,” Greenstreet said. “People who are not gardeners overthink it. It’s all about the roots, all about the soil.”
“As long as you’re consistent with plants,” he said, “that’s what makes it a success.”
