By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on November 7, 2003
At the Annual Symposium of the Native Plant Society of Texas (NPSOT) last month, the Boerne Chapter was requested to present a workshop on Operation NICE! (Natives Instead of the Common Exotics!).
There was statewide interest in this program that began in Boerne. While Rebecca Rogers was President of the Boerne Chapter, she also was Kendall County Extension Agent for Family and Consumer Services.
Rogers’ bosses seemed to need justification for the time she worked with NPSOT. Toward this end, one of her colleagues in the State Extension Service suggested that the Boerne Chapter might try a program similar to the Texas A&M Coordinated Education Marketing Assistance Program (CЕMАР).
That program is aimed at helping the nursery industry promote its products and also to encourage environmentally responsible landscaping by homeowners.
Rogers described CEMAP at the November 2001 Boerne Chapter board meeting, and immediately the board members saw possibilities for a chapter program.
After all, the Boerne Chapter already was encouraging environmentally responsible landscaping among its members through the speaker program and by featuring a different Native Plant of the Month at every chapter meeting.
Hearing about the State Extension program led us to consider how we could extend our program of education about landscaping with native plants to the whole Boerne community. And so it was that at this board meeting Operation NICE! was conceived.
The gestation period for the program was amazingly short, considering how multifaceted Operation NICE! turned out to be.
The main idea was to work through local nurseries to highlight a different native plant for landscaping every month. But could we actually find retail nurseries to participate in a program to promote native plants over the common exotic landscape plants, the very plants which make their profit? In Boerne we could!
In a short time, Barkley’s Nursery Center, Boerne in Bloom Garden Center, Fair Oaks Nursery, Hill Country African Violets and Nursery. and Where Wild Things Grow Native-Plant Nursery generously agreed to cooperate in Operation NICE!. Later, Maldonado Landscape and Nursery also joined the program.
Plans were made for each nursery to have its own representative from our NICE! squad. Each contact person would visit a nursery a couple of times a month to solicit input on our selection of Plants of the Month and to keep the nursery owner informed about wholesalers’ stock of these plants.
At the first of each month, the nurseries would be provided with displays on the new Plant of the Month and copies of care instruction sheets to be made available to their customers.
The birth announcement for Operation NICE! appeared in the second Boerne Chapter, NPSOT column in The Boerne Star published on March 12, 2002.
The next day NICE! was featured in an article in The Hill Country Recorder. Shortly after that. The Recorder also kindly agreed to publish a biweekly NPSOT column. 0588-150 Without this generous support from both Boerne newspapers, we could reach only a small audience with our message about the ecological and economic benefits of landscaping with native plants.
The biweekly columns have proven to be effective vehicles for spreading the word. The first native we selected to show off the infant Operation NICE! was Texas mountain laurel. This was Plant of the Month for April 2002. The drought-resistant evergreen foliage and beautiful clusters of purple blooms were to be highlighted in both newspaper columns.
Little did we know that two record freezes in early spring would make it impossible for our retail nurseries to get blooming Texas mountain laurels that month.
Other growing pains for Operation NICE! resulted from wholesalers’ supply. Some native plants we would like to choose for Plant of the Month are just not available on the commercial market.
We chose blackfoot daisy to be Plant of the Month for May, but that plant was so popular with landscapers that supplies had sold out in February.
Operation NICE! requires a great deal of coordination and cooperation among our NICE! squad, the participating local nurseries, and their wholesalers. Growing into a mature program won’t always be easy.
However, we have a dedicated group involved in Operation NICE!, and our efforts seem to be bringing results in the Boerne community.
Have NICE! day!
