We
are surrounded by everyday consumer products and rarely think about how
they came about. Some of the origin stories behind them involve people
with fascinating histories, but you’d never know until someone digs into
their background. Miracle-Gro plant fertilizer was brought to market by
Otto Stern and Horace Hagedorn.
But first, Otto
Stern had to escape Nazi Germany. Stern, a German Jew, had been arrested
during Kristallnacht, deserted by his non-Jewish wife, and imprisoned
in a concentration camp. He held on, dreaming of a post-war life. When
he was released from the camps after Hitler's downfall, he left Germany,
bouncing from Cuba to America and finally ending up in Geneva, New
York. If Gloversville was a glove town, and Danbury a hat city, Geneva
was (and is) a plant capital, home to federal and state agricultural
agencies, and a capitalist Eden of for-sale trees, flowers and other
green stuff. There, Stern began to grow a new life for himself, starting
up his own nursery and setting it apart with what was then a novel
idea: order from his shop, and he would ship the plants anywhere in the
country. You could come home to find a rosebush waiting for you on your
porch.
Stern also sold fertilizer to go along with
his mail-order plants. But his business didn’t really take off until he
met a radio adman who wanted to grow bigger tomatoes. They spent a lot
of time together because Stern had such a thick accent that he was
uncomfortable talking on a phone, and their conversation often veered
from advertising into their mutual interest in gardening. The story of
how that led to to phenomena of Miracle-Gro is told at Atlas Obscura
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