Specialty Tropicals is founded on three pillars: Family, Faith, and Love.
Steve Hawkins has been a "plant-nerd" by anyone's definition his entire life. Growing up in rural Southern Appalachia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, Steve's family instilled a love of gardening and farming in him almost from birth.
Growing up, our family was very close and worked together--not only in the
family building-supply business that fed multiple generations of my own
immediate family, but also my dad's parents, my aunt and uncle and our
first cousins, but also in raising food for us all. Our biggest garden was at
my paternal grandparents' house, where a large plot between the old board-fenced riding ring and the barn was plowed and planted with every sort of vegetable that loves the Southern heat, from beans and corn to okra, tomatoes, cukes and crookneck squash, even things like radishes and beets that not everyone around us grew. In Fall, the garden was given over to various greens like Mustard, Turnip, Collards, and Rape, as well as sometimes pumpkin vines, providing homegrown Jack o' Lanterns come late October.
For most kids I knew (and certainly for my brother, sisters and I), the Sears Roebuck & Co. "Wish Book" was the focus of much perusal and fervent wishing in the months leading up to Christmas. But it was the W. Atlee Burpee Seed Company catalog that captured my imagination even more! Grandmother Hawkins and I used to sit on the sofa in her paneled living room, browsing the catalog and making lists of seeds to order for the coming year's garden. She and I enjoyed the process of planting the seeds and growing them into young plants in her spare bedroom on the sewing table near the window, as well as setting them into the warm earth (never before Mother's Day!) and watching them mature. Some of my most deep-rooted recollections of feeling loved come from time spent in the garden with her (she loved to pick and eat pencil-thin hot cayenne peppers straight from the plant, while I opted for the juiciest and best of the "Tommy Toes", nowadays known in more genteel circles as "cherry tomatoes."
Another fount of love and encouragement in my young life was my great-grandmother, Granny Bruner, who loved gardening and could seemingly grow anything she wanted with almost no resources of money or space. Her shady back porch with the creaky floorboards and the concrete steps to the yard was always chock-a-block with plants grown sheerly for their beauty, rather than more utilitarian horticultural pursuits. It was there that I learned to know and love Coleus ("Joseph's Coat", frequently attended by a recounting of the story of the great Biblical patriarch), Achemene ("Monkey Faces"), Morning Glories (a despised weed -or- a beautiful ornamental vine, depending on whether it grew in the garden or on a carefully-tended trellis at the corner of the old wooden house), Begonias, Mums, and many more.
My mom loved roses, Granny Gibbs (Mom's mother) was a fan of wildflowers. Dad put heart and soul into raising tomatoes, and all of our family took part in raising black and red Angus beef cattle, hogs, chickens, and the horses and ponies that pulled us in a two-wheeled cart all over my granddad's property. Later, I would raise dairy goats with a dear friend for many years, as well as chickens (and our sons are pressuring us for some more livestock as we speak!)
The home my dad's parents occupied had been the site of a nursery business near the
turn of the twentieth century, and I spent a lot of my childhood observing and learning
to identify the plants and trees that grew there.
My first home greenhouse was a Christmas gift sometime in the latter 1970s, a simple affair of 2x4 lumber covered with polyethylene. It measured about six-by-ten feet and featured a narrow door and no real means of heating, much less luxuries like electricity or running water. Still, it was the genesis of a life's work. By junior high school, I had graduated to a larger greenhouse, built of corrugated plastic, with a storm door and roof vents. As a newly-minted teenager, I was possessed of enough ingenuity to run my own plumbing and electric connections, courtesy of hoses and dropcords run from my parents' house, and successfully grew and began to sell a few tropical plants in those days, long before the internet was something most Americans had every heard of, much less used.
As an undergraduate studying Biology, I saved money from summer work for a couple of years and with some assitance from my dad, built a larger greenhouse, 24 x 48 feet, with a brick foundation, fourteen foot peaked roof, corrugated insulated Lexel covering, sliding patio door, full plumbing and electric, and lots of home-engineered systems for automatic watering, humidity control, water filtration, and more. This is the facility we still use, a few hundred feet from the front door of the house we built on family land about seven years ago.
Though Steve has grown and sold tropical plants online for many years, the advent of the COVID pandemic, as well as the many opportunities associated with parenting two children with special needs (Sawyer, 13, has a type of high-functioning austism; Cooper, 9, was born
with Down Syndrome) caused us to seriously evaluate our options and make choices that would allow us to be consistently present for our sons while making a living and teaching them valuable life skills.
In mid-2023, we transitioned from sales exclusively through Etsy, eBay, and Facebook, to our own independent website (specialtytropicals.com), and were shocked by the response! Not only did we immediately begin getting visitors from across the U.S. and around the world, but we discovered that there were far more people in Western North Carolina (and beyond) willing to travel to shop with us in person.
Our business model is pretty simple:
(A) Provide customers with truly unique plant offerings--not the same few varieties offered by big-box retail stores and most garden centers, but actual rare and unique plants desired by serious collectors, as well as an assortment of easy-to-grow options for casual gardeners. We accomplish this by studying the hobbyist market and listening to our customers' input, so please let us know what you grow, what you're looking for, and what excites you--we use your input to guide our choices of what to offer. And closely related is another principle:
we grow what we love, too!
(B) Treat customers as we want to be treated when purchasing plants. This means high quality products, always good value for your money, and looking for every opportunity to surprise our customers with outstanding service and a spirit of generosity. As Christian businesspeople, our goal is to reflect grace and love in all our interactions, whether with clients, vendors, or service providers.
(C) Provide more than a product: When we purchase plants for our own collection, we are looking not just for green leaves or colorful flowers, but for something truly beautiful to appreciate. Part of providing that to our customers means giving you not just great, healthy plants, but the knowledge and resources to grow them well. Ultimately, for us "plant nerds", our joy is both in owning a wonderful, unique plant we love, and in the satisfaction of caring for it and seeing it grow and flourish. We know that there are lots of places you can purchase plants (albeit, not many that offer many of the varieties we do), but we find that few of those sources are prepared to assist customers with the knowledge and encouragement they need to truly succeed as "plant parents." Because of this, service after the sale is one of the cornerstones of our business model. When we say, "Call us any time, ask us anything" we really mean that! While family life takes priority, we respond quickly to calls, emails, and messages via our website, and we truly enjoy talking with you about your botanical interests and helping you achieve the success you hope for with our beautiful plants.
In addition to studying, searching, growing, selling, and educating people about plants, our family loves to travel (Steve has spent a lot of time in Germany and Austria, and we travel back there as often as schedule and finances allow.) One of the best aspects of homeschool for Sawyer and Cooper is lots of experiential learning, and we try to take advantage of every opportunity for field trips. Kristi's growing craft and art business (Blackberry Ridge Hearth and Home) keeps her busy, designing and painting decor items for customers. Steve is lead pastor of a local church community (Blue Ridge Church, Marion, NC) and devotes time to studying and teaching people about wildlife and nature. Kristi also enjoys singing, decorating, and being a full-time mom. Steve's other hobbies include cooking, writing, and storytelling. Sawyer (13) is a lover of all things related to natural history, particularly paleontology (ask him anything about dinosaurs or wildlife and he'll happily tell you all sorts of amazing facts) and enjoys being creative with Lego blocks, drawing, and occasional kitchen experiments. Cooper's passions include food (watching TV cooking shows, preparing food, and dining), Transformers, and cartoons, and both boys enjoy helping Daddy work on the property, whether in the greenhouses or around the house.
That's a bit of our story...we'd love to hear yours!