THETFORD — After more than 50 years in the Brown family, garden center E.C. Browns’ Nursery will continue under new ownership.
Part-time Post Mills resident John Freeman and his business partners purchased the nursery from the family for $1.1 million in a sale that closed earlier this month.
“It would’ve been great for a third generation of Browns to take over but there wasn’t one,” Kirk Brown, whose father Elmer C. Brown started the nursery in 1967, said in an interview.
He and his twin brother Kevin Brown both have children, but none of them were interested in taking on the family business, Kirk Brown said.
Selling to someone with roots in the Upper Valley, like Freeman, was the next best thing, he said.
Kevin Brown took over the nursery in the early 2000s. Kirk Brown started assisting with business operations in 2024. Elmer Brown died in 2019 and his wife Bertha Brown died five years later.
Now 65, the brothers put the business on the market in 2024 to little interest. The roughly 11-acre property, located on Route 13 in Thetford Center, includes a red-brick home where the Brown family once lived, and selling the business and house as a package proved difficult.
The siblings were “getting close to the point where if this doesn’t sell soon we were going to have to close it,” Kirk Brown said.
Then in November, they received multiple offers, including one from Freeman, who plans to rent out the house after replacing a few elements like the wallpaper.
Now retired from running an investment management company, Freeman grew up in Norwich where his mom nurtured ornamental trees such as weeping willows and mountain ash. The two of them would pay visits to E.C. Browns’ on what Freeman thought of as a “road trip.”
“It seemed like it was so far to drive all the way up there from Norwich,” he said in a phone interview.
Now living in San Diego, Freeman owns a house on Lake Fairlee, where he stays in the summers.
He and his business partners, including Fred Fournier who attended the University of Vermont, as did Freeman and the Brown brothers, plan to put $60,000 into replacing E.C. Browns’ greenhouses. They also plan to add “Landscaping” to the business’ name, as that’s long been a part of the garden center’s offerings, and to make the “s” in E.C Browns’, possessive singular, instead of plural, Freeman said.
But beyond that they want to leave the nursery largely untouched.
“The number one thing we said was regardless of price we wouldn’t do it unless the employees will stay,” he said. “There’s so much institutional knowledge there.”
Many of E.C. Browns’ five full-time employees have been working there for decades. Chris Wilson got a job at the nursery in the ’80s. Now 72, he’s been gardening since he was 4 years old.
He’s watched E.C. Browns’ offerings evolve with time. As the climate has warmed in the past decade, the store has started offering plants such as peach trees and Japanese quince, which wouldn’t have survived in Vermont when the weather was harsher.
He’s also observed more customers buying up plants that are native to the area to support the environment’s biodiversity.
Wilson himself is a passionate gardener. Every year he invites customers to his home in West Newbury, Vt., for summer garden parties where they can peruse his lilacs, daffodils and hydrangeas.
On Monday, he and a fellow employee debated the pronunciation of the Latin name of a plant, while potting in the greenhouse.
The nursery closes each year around early December and Wilson and his colleagues are preparing to open again come spring.
When Wilson learned that business was going on the market, he worried it wouldn’t be around much longer.
“(I’m) happy that it’s going on, and that it’s still going to be a business,” he said.
CLARIFICATION: Kirk Brown assisted his brother Kevin Brown with E.C. Browns’ business operations starting in 2024. A previous version of this story was unclear about when he began helping his brother.
