A LITTLE BIT OF ART
CMU graduate spruces up gardens with plant markers
At garden centers across the country, shoppers may encounter a curious display. A pile of wooden stakes sits near the checkout — on one side, a cute sculpture of a tomato or another vegetable; on the other, a warning: “Keep away from children and vampires.”
Jed Darland, the founder of Plant Picket, chuckled when questioned about the label.
“You know the old adage about a wooden stake into the heart of a vampire?” the 2003 architectural graduate of Carnegie Mellon University asked. “We don’t ever mention that [warning] to customers, but we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback about it.”
The 8-inch-long wooden stakes are Plant Picket’s main product — a marker with a small polymer clay sculpture of a fruit or vegetable to designate where certain crops are planted.
And those tiny sculptures of onions and tomatoes are first created at a studio in Verona.
The stakes are a seasonal product, resurging with the warm seasons and netting $155,000 in annual revenue for the company. Plant Picket is a branch of Daarlandt Partners Inc., a consulting and design firm based in Washington state that Mr. Darland also runs. He returned to the West Coast after graduating from college.
When he made the first plant pickets, he didn’t intend to sell them. They were for his own garden.
“They were made from leftover scraps of wood from my furniture refurbishing products,” Mr. Darland said. “Mainly, I did’t want my sloppy handwriting to interfere with the natural beauty of my garden, but a dozen or so clients of
mine who saw the plant markers asked me where I got them.”
Mr. Darland said he uses his condominium as a meeting place and showroom for clients. The garden is visible from there.
Encouraged by the response, he packed up his prototype and took it to a garden show in Chicago. That was 2003. By 2011, he had filed to patent the design.
He would spend the next two years on the road doing market testing, showcasing the product at hundreds of garden shows before finally alighting in Pittsburgh, where he began manufacturing them en masse.
The company moved manufacturing closer to its headquarters in 2015 to reduce freight costs and environmental impact, Mr. Darland said, but added “the machinery for our premium stakes will always carry the Pittsburgh, PA brand.”
For a while, he himself created the tiny fruit and vegetable sculptures that lend character to the stakes, but eventually he met Les Polinko — the president of Pittsburgh’s Polymer Clay Guild — through a mutual friend. Based in Verona, Ms. Polinko now produces most of the company’s sculptures, including small berries, corn, zucchini and asparagus.
“Basically, what I do is I use polymer clay to sculpt to scale a vegetable that goes in the stake, and then Jed has them reproduced through injection molds,” Ms. Polinko said. “They’re handpainted, and then they’re set into an acrylic block, which is then mass-produced.”
All of the wood the company uses is refurbished, things like old redwood and bamboo. In the future, the company expects to add a slew of materials like black walnut, white oak and orange osage wood.
Mr. Darland said Plant Picket is eyeing the Southern Hemisphere — particularly Australia and South Africa — for expansion to extend the product’s profitability through the winter months.
Right now, the company’s products are carried in more than 300 garden centers in 42 states and in its online store, with most markers costing between $6-$9 each.
In Pittsburgh, the garden stakes can be bought at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Schenley Park or at Best Feeds Garden Centers.
The company manufactures the bamboo in China, “close to the source,” and also has a location in Bermuda, according to Mr. Darland.
Mr. Darland manages the company from Washington but occasionally takes to the road with his team in a Legend Lime and White 1973 Volkswagen Westfalia Campmobile, the sort of vibrant and ostentatiously hipster van that dominated the California roadways in the 1970s.
“When the Plant Picket team travels, we really make it count,” he said. “We take it to all our shows and events, cooking dinner over campfire, roasting marshmallows.”