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Wingard’s Nursery has been owned by husband and wife team Marjorie and Judson Wingard for 33 years. Mrs. Wingard states: “My husband worked for SCE&G, and I was a part–time mail carrier. We had no intentions of doing this. We were just rooting our neighbor’s azaleas for ourselves. We had four daughters and too many azaleas so we let the girls sell the plants by the side of the road. We gradually worked into a business after our retirement. It just kept blooming.”
Today they operate a seven–acre nursery with six full time employees and one part–timer. The Wingard’s workday is from 6 am until 7:30 pm. Marjorie notes, “We work continuously but we don’t work as hard as we used to. On Sunday the work schedule is from 1:30 pm until 6 pm.
Their employees know plants having taken horticulture in high school and technical college. They also learn on the job from the Wingards and from knowledgeable clientele. Marjorie learned the business by reading, taking classes offered through Clemson extension, and from customers sharing information. The horticulture class at Lexington High visits the nursery as part of plant identification study each fall.
The nursery, once a rural plant oasis in Lexington County, is now surrounded by new subdivisions, highway construction, and shopping centers. The construction boom has been a boon to their business. When homeowners bring in a sketch of their property, staff can suggest a palette of landscape and bedding plants based on light, height, color, and purpose. Judson has noticed an increase in sales of plants to local businesses too.
The nursery sells annuals and perennials, herbs, ornamental shrubs and trees, ornamental grasses, and fruit trees. In December, they sell Leyland Cypress from their nearby tree farm. Marjorie speculates, “ We root and grow 50% of our own plants mainly ornamental shrubs and grasses including gardenia, yaupon and hellori holly, lorapetalum, fragrant tea olives. We root 95% of our azaleas.”
Judson took me on a tour of the azalea nursery from potting shed to cold frame to growing bed to sales bed. We rode a golf cart through wooded slopes down to Lake Murray where the Wingards pipe water to irrigate the nursery.
En route we toured the daylily garden of their oldest daughter, a member of the daylily society. She propagates daylilies at her home contiguous to the nursery. As Judson pointed to her gardens, he smiled and said, “ We swap dirt for her daylilies.” In a sunlit area at the front of the nursery is a large sales plot of daughter daylilies.
The three room garden office, a 150–year–old home, was the birthplace of Judson Wingard. Family roots grow deep in this soil and in the plants shared throughout the community.
Take your own garden safari at Wingard’s on Hwy. #6 in Lexington toward the Lake Murray Dam.
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