Dixie Green provides 100,000 poinsettias for holidays

By Scott Wright

CENTRE — A local nursery run by a trio of brothers helps ensure that the halls of the Happiest Place on Earth are decked out in the appropriate colors come Christmastime. Every November, Dixie Green in Centre ships over 100,000 poinsettias to Walt Disney World in Florida for use in the complex's flower beds, landscaped walkways, queue lines and resorts.

“We had some friends down in Florida that we knew, and Disney was looking for some certain plants, and our friends couldn't locate them so they called us,” Dixie Green President Harlan Richardson said, explaining how the partnership began 20 years ago. “That got our foot in the door, and we got to talking to them.”

Richardson explained that Disney usually tries to buy all their supplies locally, within the immediate area around Orlando where the 28,000-acre entertainment complex is located. But for the last two decades and even though they have their own greenhouses on-site, Disney has bought the vast majority of their poinsettias from Dixie Green.

“Our product is a better product,” he said. “There, they plant all their products outside, but it's so warm down there that the plants are softer. Ours, we can let them get cooler at night and that hardens them up, makes them last longer. We have a stouter plant.”

Richardson said the more rigid plants from Dixie Green live longer and contribute to maintaining the holiday look Disney is after in landscaped areas at the Magic Kingdom, Disney-MGM Studios and Epcot Center. Richardson said every shipment that leaves Dixie Green is labeled for a specific area of the park.

“When it's time to ship, we pull the plants according to which specific flower bed or area they go into,” he said. “We pull the plants, put them all on a rolling rack and each rack is marked. When they get the load, they know exactly where those plants are to be planted.”

Dixie Green first opened its doors in the late 1980s when Harlan and his brothers Jerry and Hank decided they didn't want to travel to Rome or Gadsden to earn a living.

“My brothers and I started because there wasn't a whole lot of industry around at the time where we could make a living,” he said. “We wanted to stay around the area and a friend of ours had some greenhouses and we were farming, so we just got into it.”

“Our partner was Tommy Graves and he owned the land where we are now,” Richardson continued. “We had a few greenhouses over where we live, but the blizzard of 1993 put everything on the ground, so after that we moved over here. We were partners with Tommy already so when we had to start over we put everything together.”

Graves passed away in 1994, but the Richardson brothers stuck with the nursery business and have done well for themselves over the past 13 years. Richardson said the busiest time of year comes in the spring when there are anywhere from 45 to 90 people working in the 250,000 square feet of greenhouse space at the site on County Road 69 between Cedar Bluff and Centre.

Richardson said the majority of the spring inventory usually ends up for sale at home improvement centers across the region, although this summer's drought hurt business by reducing sales and necessitating extra expenditures for water.

“The drought really affected our sales into Georgia, since they had all the water emergencies over there,” he said. “We've had a lot of orders cancelled. Plus, the lake is so low right now that we can't pump water out of there so we can't use that water. We are having to buy water.”

Richardson said the water table has dropped so low that the company's five wells aren't able to provide sufficient water to keep plants alive.

“They'll pump for a while, but then the pumps just sits there running so we have to shut it down to keep from burning them up,” he said. “The wells were all we needed as long as we had plenty of rain, but not now. Now we have a water bill from the county of $5,000 or $6,000 a month that we didn't have before.”

Richardson said the process of getting ready to ship between 100,000 and 125,000 poinsettias to the park gets underway in July when planting begins and culminates with semi-trucks filled with potted poinsettias in a variety of colors headed south.

“We have a few that go down in December, but the majority of them are already down there,” he said. “They use them at all of the parks and also on their cruise ships.”

A ride through the vast facility is eye-opening, partly because the multiple 100-yard-long greenhouses are difficult to see from the front entrance. Storage areas are alternately completely empty and filled to bursting with poinsettias in red, white, pink, yellow and marble, a combination of pink and yellow.

"All of these that you see in here will be loaded on that semi-trailer later today and headed out for delivery," Richardson said, pointing to thousands of red and yellow poinsettias. "Before you know it, they'll all be gone and we'll be getting ready for spring."