Royal City Nursery is not just a great place to buy plants; since opening our doors, we’ve worked hard to become a proud member of the Guelph community, with a family history full of passion, wisdom, and sincere devotion to the progression and experience of local horticulture. I want to take you back in time to where it all started and share with you the story of how Dave and I grew to become your local green space specialists.
When my grandfather—a master horticulturist—emigrated from Denmark in the 1950s, he decided to settle in Southern Ontario, where he and my grandmother eventually saved enough money to purchase the original garden centre’s Woodlawn Road property in 1962. Royal City Nursery sprang from these seeds of dedication and passionate vision sown by my grandparents, marking the beginning of my family’s local horticultural legacy.
Far from the garden centre we know today, the original Royal City Nursery was literally just a field filled with trees and evergreens. If a particular plant caught a passing customer’s eye, my grandfather would dig it up for them by hand! This property is where our family grew various landscape plants, started a cucumber farm, and built our very first storefront. It was also the place the next two generations of Olsen children (my father and I) called home, where we cultivated our love of plants and deepened our connection to the Guelph community.
By the time the 1980s rolled around, my father had gone into partnership with his parents, and by 2000 my mom Doreen was also involved in the garden centre, making it a true family affair. However, shortly after, Royal City Nursery was faced with new challenges that jeopardized the future of our growing family business: in 2005, my father underwent a double lung transplant, leaving me to help run the garden centre while also trying to spend time with my dad.
Thankfully, my father eventually recovered and quickly jumped back into the work he loved, but our challenges were far from over. The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario informed us that Highway 7 was going to be built through our property and that we should prepare for expropriation. After enduring 35 years with this threat looming over us, we finally received our final notice in 2014, leaving us just 120 days to find a new home and forcing me to make a difficult choice: open a new garden centre, or walk away.
I decided to persevere, opening up a temporary office location 200 feet away from the original site. Our new setup was far from ideal; we had no land for a tree yard and no access to water for our plants. However, I managed to negotiate with the Ministry of Transportation to allow the storage of our plants at the previous location, which meant customers could make their purchases at the new office and walk back to the tree yard to pick up their plants. It also meant we had to run a garden hose from the leased building through a vacant lot to the tree yard. Thankfully, this arrangement worked, and we were able to survive that year. We’re incredibly thankful for our customer base because they all knew we were going through hell. When you go through hard times, you find out who your community is pretty quickly, and we are forever grateful that ours is so much bigger than we thought. I’m incredibly thankful to the team we had, too, some of whom are still with us today!
Beginning in April 2015, with my father about to enter hospice care, it was up to me to juggle the demands of running the family business while shopping around for a new property. In the absence of a permanent property, I needed to make a plan, so Dave and I decided to sell our home to purchase the property Royal City Nursery sits on today. After navigating some complicated zoning laws, building permits, and other hurdles, I finally received the keys to our new house and the new space for the Royal City Nursery site. As a step forward, it was monumental yet incredibly bittersweet; my father passed just 12 hours earlier that morning.
In retrospect, while I remember many people being apprehensive about moving on, the new space gave us both closure and a fresh beginning we didn’t know we needed. However, it still took quite a bit of time to see it for the opportunity it was. Royal City Nursery was my parents’ business. It was their retirement, their legacy, so when we moved, I knew exactly what was at stake. It was one of those life-changing decisions that you know will have many more immediate implications.
Royal City Nursery’s new location opened in April of 2016 and boasted a new fashion boutique, Christmas area, and lots of new space to grow. We’ve since grown to have a tropical house complete with full heat and climate control, along with a gorgeous indoor space that is fully functional 12 months a year. The constant threat of being kicked out made it nearly impossible to expand in the old location, but here, we’re free to do what we want. Royal City Nursery is all ours, and that feels good!
Getting to this new Royal City Nursery location has required quite a bit of growth, but it’s also been so much fun for Dave and me. Moving to our new space has allowed us to maintain our family’s relationship with the community, and we now have clients who’ve been coming to us for three and even four generations. We can honestly call many of our clients our friends, and it’s both comforting and exciting to see them come back year after year. It’s a legacy we love being a part of, and we will always remember the strength of the village that got us here, that lifted us up when we needed it the most.
When we look at where we’re going, one of my hopes is that we, as a business, can keep giving back to the community. After all, without our community, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. I want to continue being a meaningful and dependable year-round company that can serve the community, but also be a leader in Guelph’s horticultural and landscaping needs. We also have the space now to create a “classroom-style” learning environment where I hope to host year-round workshops and seminars for our team, clients, and community. We’re already thinking about various Christmas workshops we can run for the upcoming season, along with spring and summer planter design classes and even some seed-starting seminars.
The other big opportunity we have right now is to return to our roots. My grandfather started Royal City Nursery as a growing company, and now we can actually grow! Having a space that is uniquely ours has allowed us to do some of the things we’ve been wanting to try for a long time. For instance, when we moved our retail operations into the big new steel timber framed building, it left our 6000-square-foot greenhouse free for us to try our hand at cultivating perennials. To great success; we’re now in our third year of perennial production! We’re now free to explore different paths and ventures as a team, and there’s nobody coming to take it. It’s all ours!
For me, the new Royal City Nursery means we can secure the legacy of our family business while also moving it forward. We’ve been here for eight years and have only used half the property, so there’s still so much we can do. It’s not just Dave and I growing the business, either; there’s a full team behind us whose ideas and perspectives are hugely important to us. We have a family here: the Royal City Nursery family!
We’re hopeful for our future, and it feels like those first few days of spring, where you go outside and suddenly smell the scent of fresh, moist soil. It’s that sense of renewal and rebirth that holds so much opportunity and just instinctively clicks in your brain. Suddenly, there’s this optimism in the air, and we have so much to look forward to. It’s unlikely that Royal City Nursery will ever finish growing, which is just fine by us!
We want to thank you for being a part of our community and the Royal City Nursery family, and we look forward to seeing you at the new greenhouse for all of your growing needs.
You can count on us for continued service for many, many more years to come!
