The Spotlight: Digging Deep to Build TN Nursery

Tammy Sons

Ask Tammy Sons what helped her grow Tennessee Wholesale Nursery (TN Nursery) into a thriving, $8 million business, and she’ll put her commitment to learning at the top of the list.

“I think relentless learning and a deep understanding and experience of the industry, along with long work hours and willpower, are powerful weapons,” Sons said. “They give you an arsenal to excel.”

When it comes to growing things, Sons’ first teacher was her father, Roscoe Tate, a long-time nursery man who taught her everything he knew about his field.

But Sons didn’t stop with that solid foundation. She studied horticulture at Texas State University. And after that, she spent years learning as much as she could about business, marketing, and public relations by taking online Harvard University courses. Nearly 30 years after launching TN Nursery, Sons still takes online classes to sharpen her marketing skills and master new trends.

She has no doubt that her commitment to learning, along with tenacity and years of hard work, are what allowed her, a female business owner, to rise above the competition in a mostly male industry.

Today, Sons says, TN Nursery is the second-largest native plant nursery in the United States, with more than 300 species available. Its products have graced the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, the Washington Monument, and 9/11 crash sites. They’ve appeared in History Channel and Discovery Channel programs.

And Sons, the nursery’s CEO, has become a sought-after subject matter expert on horticulture. She is a regular source for and contributor to media outlets including Real Simple, Homes & Gardens, Forbes, Newsweek, MarthaStewart.com, and others, where she shares insights on topics ranging from plant care and landscaping trends to sustainable gardening.

The latter topic is a particular passion of Sons’ and has been her nursery’s focus from the beginning.

“We primarily focus on sustainability, landscaping with native plants,” she said. “They’re disease and pest resistant. They’re not susceptible to blight or fungus. They’re drought tolerant. They adapt to many soils.

“I knew when I got into this industry that if I sold a product, I wanted to stand behind it. With native plants, I could guarantee them.”

Garden-Raised

To listen to Sons describe her business goals, one would think that nursery ownership was a foregone conclusion when she was growing up. But that wasn’t the case for her.

Sons believes her commitment to learning and hard work helped propel her nursery to success.

As much as Sons values the years she spent working with her father at his nursery, she didn’t always want to follow in his footsteps. She saw the toll that the stress of running a business took on him, and as a young adult, she decided to take a different path.

Before long, though, she and her husband, Dennis, would rethink that decision.

“We couldn’t afford to make ends meet,” Sons said. “My husband was a Master Logger, that’s a timber cutter, and I worked as an office manager for my dad part time, two days a week, and then I worked at the courthouse, all while going to school. But we still couldn’t afford a lot of necessities that most people take for granted.”

So Sons looked for more ways to bring in money. She started spending weekends buying plants from wholesale growers and reselling them to anyone and everyone she could convince to buy some.

“After doing this a couple years, I realized that peddling plants gave us more supplemental income than our full-time jobs were giving us,” Sons said.

As much as she’d initially resisted the idea, she decided that full-time nursery work was probably her best pathway to a better future. She certainly had the knowledge she needed.

Growing Pains

That knowledge would help, but after launching her own small nursery in the early 1980s, she found that the things she’d learned from her father would only get her business so far.

“My greatest challenge was being a woman in a male-dominated industry,” she said. “It was very tough on me. For many years, I didn’t get the acknowledgment, the respect that men did.”

There would be other challenges during those early years. Limited funds for equipment. Limited acreage to grow plants. Heavy competition (TN Nursery is 28 miles away from the “nursery capital of the world,” McMinnville, Tennessee, home to more than 300 nurseries).

And there was the risk associated with any new business. Sons says she felt that sense of uncertainty all the more acutely after Dennis decided to step out in faith, quit his job, and help her with TN Nursery. Suddenly, the family was utterly dependent on their new venture.

Tammy and Dennis Sons

“I was eight months expecting and on bed rest with our second child,” Sons said. “That was very, very scary for me. It was the start of a lot of hard work, but it led us to full dedication.”

As soon as she was able, Sons dove into horticulture studies. Dennis focused on planting with the help of their oldest son, Philip. Things didn’t always go perfectly, but the business survived, and over time, it grew.

Today, the direct-to-consumer company grosses $8 million annually. It ships products to nearly every state in the U.S. and fills more than 120,000 orders a year.

“People ask me, ‘Have you ever been disheartened? Have you ever felt burned out?’” Sons said. “Absolutely. I’ve been knocked down many times, but the secret is always to get back up. I’ve been tough on myself. I would work when everyone else was asleep. That’s what you’ve got to do; you have to be tough on yourself. You can’t quit. If you get knocked down, get back up and work hard.”

Enjoying the Harvest

Running the business remains hard work today, but more often than not, it’s work Sons finds tremendously rewarding.

Sons loves spending time outdoors.

“I love to grow plants,” she says. “That means a lot to me, getting to be outdoors and doing what I love, to get to be out where the soil is, where the plants are.”

She also takes great satisfaction in being in a position to give back.

“There comes a certain point in your life when you don’t have to worry about monthly bills, whether you have enough in your budget to buy food like we did in the beginning. So in the early 2000s, maybe 2001 or 2002, a lot of universities were noticing our online presence, and there was an overwhelming number of people asking for plant donations for their science labs and their experiments. I started donating, and since then I’ve donated to over 60 universities. Then I started donating to nonprofits like the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, disaster-stricken areas like flood plains, areas hit by tornados, hurricanes, and it just made my heart feel happy.”

Sons says she’s grateful for the success her company has achieved. She’s honored that large, well-known customers like Arlington National Cemetery trust her nursery. But she finds it just as satisfying to meet the needs of everyday customers.

“When you do this year after year, you realize that the homeowner on a fixed income who buys a five-dollar tulip because they love tulips means just as much as those big, prestigious organizations, because they’re the ones that helped us get started.”

Learn more about Tennessee Wholesale Nursery here.

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