A customer at Patt’s Garden Center stopped by to see Posie, the store’s “spokesdog,” before he started shopping on a recent weekday.
“Posie, yay! Good morning, Posie,” he said, smiling then greeting Kate Patterson, the store’s retail manager and a daughter of its founders.
The interaction was part of an ongoing joke. The man always says hello to the dog, a Bernese mountain dog/standard poodle cross, before turning his attention to her owner.
Patterson, who helped turn Posie into a local celebrity, is more than happy to play along. Most of Posie’s fans are friends and loyal customers who are helping the Clarkston store thrive.
After having one of its most lucrative years in 2020 during the pandemic, Patt’s Garden Center is expanding by doubling its interior merchandise showroom.
Patt’s homespun marketing sensation, Posie, is never far from the action, luxuriating in her reputation developed through the costumes she wears each day in October and her starring role in a series of children’s books. Patterson is the author and Sam Coulter, a graphic communications instructor at Lewis-Clark State College, is the illustrator.
Posie is always available to be petted or pose for a picture on a bench Patt’s keeps decorated for that purpose.
Just before Feb. 14, the bench had a Valentine’s Day theme and Posie was ambling around the store wearing a scarf covered with hearts.
“(Customers) come just to see her,” Patterson said. “She looks like a cartoon. So she’s always kind of cheerful. People will come in and talk to her and then they’ll get to the business of looking around.”
The growth at Patt’s is happening at a time when Patterson and her two siblings are taking on a more prominent role in the business. Her oldest brother, Justin Patterson, returned to Clarkston in 2020 to be the grower and seed propagator. Her middle brother, Bret Patterson, is the maintenance manager.
In many ways, Patt’s is a throwback to how things used to be, and Patterson believes that’s a big reason for its success.
Her parents, Don and Sharon Patterson, founded the business when she was 4 years old. Initially they carried plants raised by other wholesalers. Then they started growing inventory themselves, gradually reaching the point they are at now where most of their annual flowers and vegetables are grown on site in Clarkston in 11 greenhouses. Perennials, trees and shrubs come from wholesalers.
Patt’s started out on the same lot as the family’s home until Kate Patterson was finishing college and the store moved to its present location at 1280 Port Drive.
“It’s just really cool to see the loyalty that my parents have built with our customer base just from the knowledge and the kind of cozy, small-business atmosphere they created,” Patterson said. “You come in here and everybody just kind of relaxes and wanders around and has a nice time.”
Posie, who turned 5 in December, fits well in that environment. She has accompanied Kate to the store since she was a puppy. Soon they were using her pictures in newspaper advertising and on social media.
Kate isn’t exactly sure when dressing up Posie for pictures began. Her first Easter, they snapped some pictures of Posie wearing bunny ears.
By the fall, she and longtime staff member Carol Church were dressing her up in a different costume every day in October. Posie has been a Fazzari’s Finest pizza delivery driver, a Tri-State Memorial Hospital Blue Angel volunteer and a Clarkston High School football player and band member.
Kate is pretty sure the first October they didn’t initially plan to have a different costume every day, but did so because the community liked it so much.
Since it was spontaneous, they didn’t have time to go searching for accessories and props, so they used whatever was in front of them.
Egg cartons painted yellow have been kernels when Posie was dressed as a corn stalk. A hat and vest Justin Patterson was wearing when he walked into the store one day became part of Posie’s fishing outfit. That happened when he was on vacation visiting Clarkston in the fall before he worked there full time. Cardboard for a car Posie posed in came from shipping boxes for bare-root roses.
“She really just enjoys the attention of the dressing up because we talk to her and feed her treats and everyone tells her how good she is,” Kate Patterson said. “So she definitely likes it.”
Posie’s notoriety grew even more when Kate made her the main character in a series of children’s books. The first, “P is for Posie,” was released in January 2020 just before the pandemic started. The second, “Posie, You’re a Gem,” was about rockhounding in the Northwest.
The third will be released March 5. It’s a children’s cookbook titled “Two Kinds of Pie.”
The books have strengthened the connection between children and Posie, who gets kids excited about stopping by the store with their parents.
“Posie is big, so some kids are intimidated by that, but she can almost tell,” Kate said. “She will lay down and let them come to her. Kids will just sit there and talk to her and pet her. We have one girl who likes to sit and braid Posie’s hair.”
Kate’s instincts for what will work at Patt’s, whether it’s finding a new outfit for Posie or selecting inventory, come from decades of being immersed in the business.
As children, she and her two brothers would weed and water plants. They would also sort and alphabetize the tags of any plants that didn’t sell so they could be reused.
“We’d come home from school and try not to make eye contact so we didn’t have to come out and help because we lived on-site,” she said. “We helped as much as we needed to, but we were kids and wanted to do other things.”
At Washington State University, she majored in English with no intention of joining the family business she was working at every weekend.
But the year she graduated was the same year Patt’s had to move because its site was being developed for Walmart. Kate came home to help with the relocation.
“I just sort of fell in love with the place and what we do, and my whole world kind of transformed from there,” she said.
Even though all three Patterson children work at Patt’s, their parents are still there full time, but have more flexibility to take days off or travel.
“They’re teaching us what we need to know so that if they do need to step away quickly, they can do that and we’ll be OK,” Kate said. “But hopefully they’ll stick around as long as they can.”
Together the family has operated Patt’s for more than three decades that included the Great Recession, a changing retail environment and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The economy always plays a big factor, whether people have disposable income to spend on their yards,” Patterson said.
The arrival of large retailers didn’t have much impact because of the products and expertise Patt’s offers, she said.
All of Patt’s employees have cultivated their own gardens for years and share advice about what they raise and the techniques that work.
As stores such as Meacham Mills in Lewiston, Fuchs Flower and Garden Center in Clarkston and Hay’s Produce in Clarkston closed, Patt’s has expanded its selection of gifts to fill the gap. It’s also added more greenhouses, partly for wholesale customers in places like Craigmont, Nezperce and Grangeville.
When the pandemic began in 2020, Patt’s was in a strong position to meet the rapid rise in demand for plants and garden supplies driven by people’s desire to grow their own food or turn their backyards into at-home retreats. They saw lots of new faces in the store, including a number of beginning gardeners.
“People just wanted to do something that was positive,” Patterson said. “I think a lot of people spend their summers traveling and didn’t realize they could turn their own backyard into a place they wanted to visit.”
The plants Patt’s grows on-site has made the business less vulnerable to supply chain issues in recent months even though they sometimes have challenges getting certain materials or cuttings to start plants.
“We don’t have to wait for it to arrive on a truck,” she said. “We just have to walk however many steps to the back 40 and bring it back up here. … We know we will have a whole greenhouse full of geraniums.”
The interest people developed in their homes and yards during the pandemic is a trend Patterson sees progressing in the future.
“People want to beautify their homes and spend time outside and kind of decompress that way,” she said. “We can help them do that.”
