A Patient Lesson In Pruning For The Garden Club Of Newtown

The intrepid members of The Garden Club of Newtown visited Planters’ Choice on the very rainy afternoon of March 23 for an informative pruning demonstration by Darryl Newman.

Program Co-Chairman Maureen McLachlan introduced Mr Newman to the group as “a hometown boy who grew up here in Newtown, left to get his college degree in Landscape Management and Horticulture in Maryland, and worked in the Washington D.C. area before finally returning home to the family business in Newtown.”

Planters’ Choice was launched by My Newman’s father, Chuck Newman, in March 1970 with one propagation house and two 50-foot hoop houses on Huntingtown Road in Newtown. Today, as the company celebrates its 40th anniversary year, the full-service wholesale nursery consists of 275 acres across five different locations in Fairfield and Litchfield Counties. It is a wholesale landscape supplier for Fairfield, Litchfield, and Hartford Counties, and also extends into New York and occasionally Boston.

Beginning his talk in the office area of the wholesale business, Mr Newman shared some basic instructions about pruning in handout form and talked about plants in general and gardening in the area, including such useful information as, “Save yourself a lot of money and don’t spend money on phosphorus. We have plenty in our soil here and you don’t need to add more.”

Cheerful in spite of the rain, Mr Newman spent the rest of the afternoon walking over the property with the garden club members, patiently explaining and demonstrating how to prune many varieties of plants from the varied shapes and types of boxwood and other bushes to lilacs and apple trees and answering many individual questions about particular problems that members have encountered.