Evelyn Weidner, the former longtime owner and co-founder of Weidners Gardens in Encinitas, died Monday at age 96.
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Known for her remarkable marketing ability and her forthright, humorous way of expressing her opinions, she received many floral industry awards over the years, both at the regional and the state level; ran the family’s nursery business for more than two decades after her husband died; helped found the “Proven Winners” plant marketing group; and also made TV garden show appearances and wrote gardening advice columns for various publications, including The San Diego Union-Tribune.
She had a knack for connecting people with plants they actually could grow. And her business ideas, such as the Weidners’ annual dig-it-yourself begonia and pansy events, were wildly popular with customers, one of her daughters and several former employees said.
“She was a dynamo,” her daughter Mary Witesman said Wednesday. “We used to say she has six ideas streaming out of her head … and we’d say, ‘Let’s pick one.’”
Her husband, Robert, was a well-known plant propagator who introduced eight bromeliads to cultivation in the 1950s, but Evelyn “was a good nurseryman in her own right and that needs to be remembered,” stressed former Weidners Gardens employee Marco Jim Booman, who now runs his own nursery business in Vista.
Kalim Owens, who along with fellow former employee Oliver Storm purchased the Weidners Gardens nursery from Evelyn when she retired in 2013, said her favorite plant was likely the Solenia Begonia. It’s a tough, easy-care plant that thrives both in sun and in shade, and comes in a wide variety of colors — essentially a “do-anything” plant, he said.
“Evelyn wanted people to do well with their plants … she always felt if the customers would do well, we would do well,” Owens said.
Born May 28, 1929, to two Swedish immigrants, she began working with plants as a child. Her dad had trained as a horticulturalist in Sweden and Germany, and he took care of Fresno’s Roeding Park before his wife convinced him to establish a plant nursery. Initially, that nursery was in Three Rivers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the family relocated to Long Beach for employment reasons and then re-started the nursery there after World War II. In a 1993 article in the Los Angeles Times, Evelyn said she could recall working in the family business when she was 7 years old.
“I loved selling the plants and happily charmed the customers,” she told the Times reporter.
As a young adult, Evelyn met her future husband while touring his business — Buena Park Greenhouses, which was then “one of the nation’s largest wholesale growers,” the Times reported. They married in 1950, had two daughters — Mary and Jan — and two sons — John and Bill.
The first Buena Park Greenhouses location at Manchester and Orangethorpe avenues became a major freeway interchange in the mid-1950s. Weidners then moved to Brea, but in the mid-1960s, that area’s increasingly smoggy air conditions were damaging the plants and the family came to Encinitas after being urged to do so by Encinitas poinsettia grower Paul Ecke Jr., Mary recalled.
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Her parents had a nursery on D Street for several years in the late 1960s, but sold that property and decided to retire, she said. But, “they retired for about five minutes,” joked Owens, the former employee who now co-owns Weidners Gardens.
The family story goes, he added, that Robert asked Evelyn if she wanted some tuberous begonias, and when Evelyn — who adored begonias and at age 16 was the queen of a Long Beach begonia show — said she definitely would, “He responded, ‘Oh, great! I just bought 25,000 (seedlings).”
Thus, the famed, dig-your-own begonias patch was founded at what is now Weidners Gardens nursery on Normandy Road in 1971. It was supposed to be a low-key, retirement business, open only in the spring and summer, or at least that was what Robert had promised Evelyn.
“I wasn’t going to spend lots of money on a real sign, so I carefully took our little saber saw and cut out giant letters and fastened them to two wires out in front where you could see them from the freeway,” Evelyn later wrote about the nursery’s start. “(The letters) said ‘Free Flower Show, Dig Your Own Begonias’. Sometimes they slid along the wires and you could hardly read them.”
It didn’t take long for the new, innovative, dig-it-yourself begonia activity to get discovered. Sunset magazine did a feature on it and within a year the nursery had became a Southern California attraction, Mary said. Then, when Robert died at age 74 in 1988, people asked Evelyn if she was going to retire and sell the nursery.
“There were a lot of people in our industry who thought we would just fade away without a man at the helm,” Evelyn later wrote in a family history document. “Well, they thought wrong. I grew up in this business and had no desire to sit home and do nothing.”
She expanded, offering dig-it-yourself pansies in the fall, and getting her daughter to work with her when she had free time from her regular job. Twenty-five years later, in 2013, Evelyn sold the nursery to two of her employees, who still operate it today.
“I worked alongside her … for 40 years and we never really fought,” said her daughter Mary, who initially started working in the family nursery business as a grade-school student. She added that her mom loved getting people to come to a consensus and adored social occasions. “She never turned down an invitation.”
A celebration of her life is planned for 1 p.m. Saturday, June 27, at Solana Beach Presbyterian Church, 120 Stevens Ave., Solana Beach. Organizers report that Evelyn asked that the church “be filled with flowers” and people are encouraged to bring either store-bought or home-grown ones.
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