Offers Mother’s Day gifts, landscape design, IrriGreen irrigation system
Business name: Echobrook Nursery
Address: 1120 Grafton St., Worcester
Co-owners: Francine and Howard Shear
Contact Information: 508-791-5939
By Nancy Brumback, Contributing Writer
What is Echobrook offering for Mother’s Day?
“We carry hanging baskets planted with Proven Winner flowers, and flowering plants such as rosebushes and hydrangeas. We have a large selection of succulents from a local grower as well as a large selection of house plants and tropical plants. We plant containers with combinations of herbs and succulents or herbs and annuals,” said Francine Shear, who has owned Echobrook Nursery with her husband, Howard, for 19 years.
“People can pick out a pot and the plants or succulents they like, and we will pot the plants up for them.
“We also have birdbaths, statuary and pottery, and there’s a 50 percent sale in our gift shop for Mothers’ Day on home décor items.” Gift certificates are available.
Echobrook will deliver Mother’s Day orders.
What plants are available in the garden center?
“Our selection of annuals is impressive. We carry everything, including unique and hard-to-find varieties. We sell annuals from local growers and Proven Winner, with new varieties such as mini-wave petunias. We can suggest combinations of annuals that will do well in containers.
“We sell a lot of perennials, and people mix them with annuals,” she said. There is a large assortment of vegetable plants and herbs.
Echobrook also offers landscape design services?
“Yes. I go out to people’s homes to see the spaces they are trying to fill, then we ask them to come to the nursery and show them the plants we’re suggesting that provide different shapes and textures, that are not going to outgrow the space and that fit the light situation,” said Howard Shear. “We sell a lot of new and unusual trees, including dwarf, weeping and topiary varieties.
“Our prices are very reasonable, and we are glad to special order trees and shrubs,” Howard added.
“What’s nice about having the garden center is our landscaping customers see what’s going into their yard—the trees and shrubs, the colors and textures. People come in with pictures, and we can do a design right here for them,” Francine added. “Our staff will assist you in choosing the best plants for your landscape, whether your design is large or small.”
“We have a great selection of unusual trees and shrubs. We offer landscape design and installation service featuring distinctive plantings as well as walls, walks and patios. We do grading and lawn installation, including seeding and sodding. We also install irrigation systems, both conventional as well as the latest water-saving IrriGreen Genius systems.
“We also offer only premium mulches, soils, sod and landscape supplies for garden center pickup or delivery available.”
What should people consider when choosing trees and shrubs?
“We can suggest a variety so you have trees flowering over a longer period instead of everything flowering at once,” Howard said. “Kousa dogwoods flower later than the cherries and crabapples and for a longer time. There are some new kousas that flower pink as well as weeping kousas. Around Father’s Day, Japanese snowbell trees flower and are very fragrant, and stewartia have flowers that look like a gardenia and interesting bark that truly stands out.
“Planting design should feature color, shapes and textures that repeat and draw the landscape together with perhaps a few specimen plants that really stand out.”