The Watkins Family: From Small Seeds

The Watkins brothers were an entrepreneurial lot - between them they formed a one-stop shop for Taranaki gardeners.

The Watkins brothers Ivon, Harry and Dan came from fine stock. Father Gus Watkins, known as Wattie, was an accountant for Taranaki Breweries, mother Alice Watkins, also known as Wattie, was from the Kyngdon family of pioneer settlers. The family's Weymouth Street home had a croquet lawn, roses and vegetables where the five children Ivon, Harry, Dan, Doreen and Peggy would play.

Like most good entrepreneurs the Watkins started out small. Looking for a business he could run himself, Ivon started a nursery in the garden. He even built himself a glass house, using old x-ray glass plates from the Barrett Street Hospital. Unfortunately the ghostly glasshouse came to a shattering end. Ivon had installed an old boiler to keep the plants warm at night, but he over stoked it on the first night and it exploded.

One day he was asked if he could make a wreath, "I said 'Certainly' though I had no idea really.” Ivon told a Daily News reporter in 1992, "I jumped on my bike and went to the cemetery to find one to see how it was made." He picked flowers from his mother's garden, made the wreaths, and, balancing a wreath on either side of his bike's handlebars, delivered them to the customer. A florist was born.

Ivon went into business on Devon Street, opening Marigold Market opposite the old Everybody's movie theatre. Harry joined the business and Marigold Market flourished. "They had some hilarious stories about their first days in business" says Harry's son Roger. "They had an old microphone attached to the underside of the window near the displays. Harry and Ivon could listen in when people commented on it. It was like an early sort of market survey. If people said ‘Oh, isn't that lovely!’ they'd work out what flowers they were talking about and incorporate it into other designs."

Another story had the two men fooling a competitor who had premises across the road. "Ivon was quite a rascal. To make sure the guy didn't know how well the business was going they would take out stuff and load it into the van and drive off. He'd go around to the back of the shop, unload it all, come back round the front empty, then load it all up again with the same stock! They'd do that occasionally just to spark the day up!" The ruse worked - the business eventually outgrew its premises and moved to a site at the corner of Devon and Currie Streets, which it shared with a bank.

Meanwhile the youngest Watkins brother Dan went off to war, working with the Medical Core in the Middle East. Years later Ivon was to recall what happened one his brother's return. "Dan was a bit of a tearaway and he got fired from a couple of jobs. We decided to open a shop upstairs above the bank, selling cage birds and aquarium fish." The business was doing well until one of the newts escaped and got stuck down a drainpipe. "The bank got flooded and the management got upset. That was really the end of the business."

Then the brothers discovered hormone weed killers, new chemicals like 24D and 245T that were being put on the US markets by a firm called Dow. The trio invited a company representative out to New Zealand. He brought with him a drum of the ‘magic hormone’ which was distributed among government bodies for trial. "That was the origin of hormone weed killers in New Zealand” says Roger. "Dow eventually gave them distribution rights."

The brothers formed Ivon Watkins Ltd, which at that stage incorporated a chemical side, a seed division and a nursery. The Fertona brand was originated and the company began packing and selling Slay Slug and other brands. "I remember at one stage they had a little old house opposite the St Josephs Convent where the Shell Todd building is now. They used to do all the packaging of the fertilisers and chemicals there. They had this big hopper and used to lug fertiliser bags up with chain and tackle and pour it into the hopper and it would flow through into the little packs that would be sealed and sold at the shops."

After moving to several different premises the company finally settled in Currie Street, opposite the Post Office. The building had a basement where all the fertilisers and bulk bins of seeds were kept. On the ground floor packets of seeds and plants from the nursery were sold, out back the florist still made wreaths and posies. A mezzanine floor was put in for Ivon Watkins Ltd Chemical. All the chemical mixing was down in a tiny laboratory down in the basement. "It was quite a primitive little laboratory but all the original work in New Zealand on plant hormones was done there by a chap by the name of Dr Priddim" says Roger.

As a young child Roger would head down stairs into the basement to talk to the doctor. "I had a great heathenistic experience immersing myself in the lupin bins and you just had your head out, with the lid down and all this cool seed around you. It was in the days before they treated seeds - so it was safe. It was absolutely fabulous! I could watch through this little crack and see everything that was going on. An embryonic experience!"

Seed was scooped out of the bins and packed into eight ounce (224 grams) and pound (450 grams) packages then sent around the region, and eventually, the country. "It was my job in the holidays to pack them up. I used to get pocket money."

Next door in the basement was a young boys dream - the Eastend Confectionary Company. "It was unbelievable! It had chocolates, rocky road, peppermint sticks, brilliant ginger bonbons… talk about Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!" The shop had a small fire escape door out onto James Lane through the factory. This little door was the entry to a young boy's dreams. "I used to go down with Dad to work at the weekends and I could get through this little door into the confectionary factory because no-one was there!"

The Watkins brothers business bloomed faster than a lawn full of daisies so in 1948 the company was split - Ivon looking after the nursery, Dan concentrating on the chemicals, and Harry running the seed business. The nursery outgrew several city sites before finally settling on land at Bell Block. Ivon Watkins Dow Chemical eventually settled at Paritūtū under the rock.

Still on Currie Street, Watkins Seeds took over from the chemical shop upstairs. "They had a retail section downstairs and they had seedlings and shrubs and chemicals, spray pumps, all sorts of things, and the floral shop still out the back and fertiliser downstairs" recalls Roger. Harry sourced most of his seeds overseas, bringing in new vegetable and flower varieties for Kiwi gardeners, many of them right on the cutting edge of imports at the time. "Everyone had a garden back in those days. It's what you did - a flower garden with a big vegie patch out the back."

Watkins Seeds put out its first catalogue in 1947, followed by a more comprehensive one in 1948. The catalogues were initially just lists of the seeds available, but soon became artworks, with pictures of vegetables and flowers gracing the pages. As the business grew, thousands of catalogues winged their way across the world to potential customers.

Harry Watkins was big on customer service. "Personalised service was his thing. He knew his customers. Over the years he got thousands of letters from people around the world, fabulous letters that were very chatty. Robert Muldoon used to correspond regularly with Dad because he was quite an ardent horticulturist. Dad would reply to them all."

Harry Watkins guaranteed the germination of the seed his company sold. "He wanted the seed to be absolutely prime so every batch that went through would be tested in a little laboratory. It had incubators and they would germinate the seed and count the number of verticals and do all the right things. It was a lot of work and took time." Harry also had a seed bank - hundreds of small sealed preserving bottles filled with seed, stacked in a cupboard. In the days before computers the bottles could be referred to for catalogue number, dates, seed tests and viabilities.

Watkins Seeds became one of the biggest seed suppliers in New Zealand. "It had the greatest range of quality seed in New Zealand, most probably the Southern Hemisphere" says Roger. "They used to supply seeds to Government House and all the Government departments, botanical gardens, universities, the lot. Remember the school garden scheme? Dad introduced that. They used to provide seed all over New Zealand and had to organise inspections of the gardens, it was a lot of work and didn't make them money - but it introduced so many children to the joys of gardening."

Watkins concentrated more on the home gardener and nurseries market, whereas companies like Yates, Coopers and Winston’s concentrated on the bulk vegetable growers. But the bigger companies had an advantage over the Taranaki grown seed supplier when packaged seeds became popular. "It was all very expensive. There were very strict licensing laws about what you could bring into the country, and if you didn't have the distribution channels it was just hopeless. Some of the companies got better allocation of licences and could afford the colour printing that caught the customers’ eyes."

In the 1950s the business became too big for Harry Watkins to operate on his own, so he went into partnership with Bill Wilson, an employee he had helped into a job years before. "In some ways that was a good move" says Roger. "It allowed Dad to travel overseas looking for seed and know the business was being looked after. But in other ways a really bad move, because it was an equal partnership and you never have equal partnerships ever!"

Roger's brother Selwyn was brought in as a director to help manage the seed company. "Bill Wilson didn't like this at all and shot through. He started up in opposition to Watkins." Harry was overseas, so Roger left university and came home to help out. Together Selwyn and Roger helped revive the business and were instrumental in introducing new trading laws in New Plymouth.

At the time shops were closed over the weekend. The brothers went to court and got an exemption to open on Saturday mornings. The business was well placed, opposite the Post Office where people do their banking and collect their mail. "It was a brilliant site because people would stop in as they went home and get some cabbages and lettuces and a bit of fertiliser…" Other retailers cottoned on, and soon New Plymouth shoppers could meander around the shops on a Saturday morning.

But the seed company was still restricted to selling anything that was green or rooted or living. It was not allowed to sell trowels, rakes or spades. "We had to keep them covered up on a Saturday morning. The council had inspectors racing around saying ‘Oh no we can see a trowel!’ And they would issue a ticket saying you were being prosecuted for exhibiting a rake! It was ridiculous. Mayor Denny Sutherland used to come in and do his shopping on a Saturday, and he'd say ‘Oh come on, I'd like a trowel - I'm just picking it up. I bought it yesterday!'" So the brothers set about successfully changing that law too. "So basically we have been instrumental in organising a lot of the trade in New Plymouth which often applied to the whole of New Zealand in the end."

But trouble was on the horizon. In 1976 the lease for the building on Currie Street was raised, and parking policy was changed bringing less customers through the door. "My wife Barbara and I had a chance to buy a nursery in south Taranaki. The business had been doing a bigger turnaround of shrubs and bulbs than anything else at that time so we shot down there and formed South Taranaki Nurseries Ltd." The couple formed Fairfield Nurseries and opened a garden centre before returning north to set up Fairfield Garden Centre on the corner of Mangorei and Junction roads.

Meanwhile Watkins Seeds Ltd, forced out by the rising lease, had moved to Gover Street in New Plymouth. It was eventually merged with Smiths Seeds and went into receivership before being purchased by Yates Seeds. It was a sad ending for a company that had, literally grown from the ground up.