The Perennial Plant Association’s (PPA) annual Symposium is a gathering of horticulture professionals and perennial plant enthusiasts. Hoffman Nursery was fortunate to have this year’s symposium in their neck of woods in Raleigh, NC. It was a jammed-pack week of tours, talks, networking, and all things perennials.
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Attendees (Mark Wessel of Gardens Alive! in the background and Brent Heath of Brent & Becky’s Bulbs far right) tour the GrassSolutions garden at Hoffman Nursery, featuring demonstration gardens for low-growing grasses and sedges as alternatives to traditional turfgrass.
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Visitors touring the gardens surrounding the main office, featuring combinations of grasses and herbaceous perennials.
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Hannah Saconn from the Hoffman Nursery growing team directed visitors and answered questions. Members of the nursery team floated around the grounds and made themselves available to visitors.
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Visitors could take guided tours focusing on grower-related points of interest, like the stock beds shown here. Visitors could also follow a self-guided tour; highlights were noted on an information sheet.
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The Carex trial garden was a popular point of interest for the self-guided tours of the nursery. This area focuses on native Carex species and pushes them to see how they’ll perform in difficult conditions. Visitors could see the toll heat and humidity take on these cool-season plants, and which ones managed to hold their own.
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Visitors walking along the Carex trial garden (in the background underneath the trees) and a hillside where Hoffman densely planted and layered a mix of grasses, sedges, and perennials to control erosion and runoff and support wildlife. Hoffman calls this slope the “EcoGarden.”
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The nursery treated visitors to a southern-style breakfast in the greenhouse.
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On the guided tour, visitors got a brief presentation at each tour stop. Here, Production Manager Brice Davis (in the green and khaki) explains the production lines.
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The guided tour included stops in Hoffman’s gutter-connect greenhouse and a chat with one of Hoffman’s growers.
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Sandra Gerdes of Better Homes & Gardens and Susan Martin of Gardener Sue’s News pause near the gardens for a photo.
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Greenhouse shot during breakfast
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The EcoGarden helps control runoff and offers ecological benefits. Hoffman also posted signs with its core values on them throughout the nursery grounds. “Celebrate Success” is one of them.
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As part of Hoffman Nursery’s preparation for the symposium, it held a design contest for local horticulture students. Students from local colleges and university submitted plans for renovating the garden in front of the main office. Co-winners of the Emerging Designers Project, Amy Fogleman (L) and Currin Blakley (R), received scholarships to attend the PPA symposium and presented their designs to visitors during the tour.
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Currin Blakley, a co-winner of the Emerging Designers Project, shows the designs to John Greenlee and Ron Zimmerman.
During this year’s event, Hoffman Nursery hosted more than 200 PPA Symposium attendees for breakfast and a tour of the nursery. Attendees could choose between a guided Grower Focus tour of the nursery, or venture on their own on a self-guided tour. The Grower Focus tour highlighted Hoffman’s production department, propagation house, new greenhouse, and shipping department, while the self-guided tour participants set their sights on Hoffman’s gardens, hoop houses, and other areas of operations.
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“The tour gave us a chance to spend more time with our customers and colleagues in a unique setting,” says Shannon Currey, Marketing Manager at Hoffman Nursery.
Check out the slideshow above for a few highlights from the tour.
September 6, 2018 
