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.
(Image credit: Flickr user Crinklecrankle.com)