Photo/Nancy Brumback
Business name: Echobrook Nursery
Address: 1120 Grafton St., Worcester
Co-owners: Francine and Howard Shear
Contact Information: 508-791-5939 www.echobrooknursery.com
By Nancy Brumback, Contributing Writer
It’s planting season. What does Echobrook have in its garden center?
“Our selection of annuals is impressive. We carry everything, including the unique and hard to find varieties. We sell annuals from local growers and Proven Winner, with new varieties such as mini-wave petunias,” said Francine Shear, who has owned Echobrook Nursery with her husband, Howard, for 18 years. They started the garden center after being in the landscape business since 1975.
“We can suggest combinations of annuals that will do well in containers. If people have a color scheme in mind, I can help them pick out what will do well, perhaps showing them something they haven’t thought of.
“We sell a lot of perennials, and people mix them with annuals,” she said, adding there is also a large selection of vegetable plants and herbs.
Echobrook sells pots, garden décor, statuary, gardening tools, soils, fertilizers and pest control products.
Echobrook also offers landscape design services?
“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.” Echobrook offers a selection of specimen trees and shrubs of all sizes.
“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.”
Echobrook can also do hardscape design and construction—walkways, walls, patios, water features.
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 snowbells flower and are very fragrant. Stellata or star magnolias bloom after that, look a little like a gardenia and have interesting bark.”
And it is important to fit the plants to the available space?
“If the shrubs in front of a home are really overgrown, it may be better to rip them out and start over, maybe using those existing shrubs somewhere else in the yard. If something wants to grow 20 feet high, you can’t keep it pruned back to eight feet. Replace it with something that’s going to grow in scale and can be there forever. You can design the front plantings from scratch with textures and colors and shapes that work well together,” Howard said.
“If, for example, the house is a Colonial that’s a mirror image on both sides of the door, the space from the stairs to the edge of the first window is only three feet wide, but it’s a blank wall two stories high. So you want some height. I’ve always got something that will fill that space, such as an Irish yew, which stays under three feet wide but can get 10 to 12 feet tall.”
What sets Echobrook apart?
“Customer service is important to us,” Francine said. “We want people to be happy.”
“Our prices are very reasonable, and we are glad to special order trees and shrubs,” Howard added.
