’Tis the Season For Change

WHEELING -- At mid-December, season change was already in the air at Nicky's Garden Center. A couple dozen poinsettias were roped off from those still for general sale by a broad purple band. They were headed to church.

Elsewhere at the Wardens Run Road property, future seasons were beginning to take shape. In a cork-insulated cooler that once stored milk destined for Oglebay and Woodsdale -- the property was a dairy farm until 1960 -- containers of spring bulbs were literally chilling.

P.J. Lenz -- who has co-owned the business with wife Nikki Lenz for more than 25 years and started working for original owner Nicky Provezis back when his age was in the single digits -- will soon plant them in readiness for late-winter forcing.

"We look forward to January, but then we start planting (baskets of summer flowers)," Lenz joked of the upside of having an energy level fit for constant change and activity. "It's 90 degrees in the greenhouse on a sunny day -- so you feel good."

CHANGE OF SEASON

Plants and decor aren't the only things changing at the center, which will mark its 50th anniversary in 2022. Like many business owners adjusting as online shopping increases, Lenz has been experimenting with experience-based and longer-term business strategies.

"It was old school retail," he joked of learning the latter from the late owner Provezis. "You don't give anything away."

In the new economy, however, giving is sometimes a form of investing, he said. There are field trips and a playground that includes toy trucks that can load actual mulch. It has taken years for that kind investment to pay a measurable return, but he said it has. "I've got kids who are driving when they're coming back (as customers)."

On the experience side, the renovated farmhouse shop has evolved to include a coffee bar and a small conference room where book clubs have already started to meet.

In 2021, the business even explored a restaurant element. Lenz purchased a food truck that became a warm-weather home to Avenue Eats after that restaurant lost its Woodsdale building to fire.

"I didn't make a dime from that," Lenz said of directly balancing the food operation with the cost of the truck. But, the investment has already paid off in other ways, he noted. On the Fridays and Saturdays the food truck was operating, the parking lot was full of people, many of whom had never shopped at the garden center.

In addition to that new customer base, he said it made people, including himself, think of the property in a new way. So, it wasn't a surprise when another restaurateur friend, Dino Figaretti, approached Nicky's when a Pittsburgh bride wanted a rehearsal dinner that couldn't fit into his holiday schedule.

Lenz, spurred on by a visit to a similar New York garden center that was hosting events, sprang into action. The main room of the dairy barn was emptied of garden supplies, which moved to the greenhouses.

The business's signature lime green and purple paint was covered with a neutral gray -- making agricultural details such as railing-free steps to a hay loft and a massive milk-cooler door pop into view. Strings of Edison lights and candlelit fixtures were hung. Long farm tables were built by a carpenter friend.

Rustic was suddenly shabby chic, and on Dec. 16, he said 35 members of the wedding party ate a Figaretti's-catered dinner in the place Hillwood Dairy once milked cows. Lenz was thrilled that something that had been in the back of his mind for years came together -- and so quickly.

"Everything in there was just a mess," he said of when the bride first visited. "Nikki's like, 'She's going to turn and run.' (But) she was one of the coolest, sweetest brides. She was, '… I feel like I'm in a Hallmark movie.'"

LONG STORY

Sometimes, the Lenzes do, as well.

Lenz explained the original Nicky (Provezis) offered to sell the center, then located in Martins Ferry, to Lenz when Lenz was just a senior in high school. Lenz had already worked multiple sides of the business for nearly a decade -- Christmas tree sales, hauling plants down from growers near Cleveland as soon as he was old enough to drive, managing the care of 60 or 70 lawns.

He was so intent on the purchase, Lenz had even sold an old Jeep in order to make a down payment on 85 acres he intended to develop as a complementary Christmas tree farm. But, the deal fell through and another man bought Nicky's.

Disappointed, Lenz pivoted, earning a degree in landscape architecture, getting married and starting a 13-year tenure with the Ohio Department of Transportation that included installing swaths of wildflowers along highways.

When he stopped by Nicky's to buy shrubbery for their new house, he wasn't expecting the new owner to ask if he was still interested in buying. He wasn't. But, his wife, who was commuting to a job in Pittsburgh, was.

"We ought to go look at least," she said, so surprisingly urgent she called Lenz on a bag phone, a predecessor of cell phones. "She had no experience at all in flowers."

The couple, whose eventual two children had yet to come along, visited Nikki's devoutly Catholic grandmother at Good Shepherd Nursing Home and asked her to pray for direction. When they got to the garden center, the first thing they saw was a statue of the Virgin Mary underneath a flag for Notre Dame (Nikki's recently deceased grandfather's favorite team).

"She (Nikki) got chills," and they decided to take a leap of faith and buy the center. Lenz already knew what to do. Nikki began training with a floral designer who did work for the White House. Soon, they were able to quit their other jobs.

They leaped again when, while Nikki was pregnant with their first child, they moved the center to a location on Bethany Pike in Wheeling. And, again, a few years ago, when they relocated once more to the long-vacant farmstead on Wardens Run Road.

Since then, the business's evolution has been on warp speed. Lenz, who said he hopes to work as long as he's alive, sees more changes coming. He anticipates more moments like the one he had at the New York garden center before launching their own event venue.

"It was like, 'This is really cool. We can do this,'" Lenz said.