Meet Our Team  »  Jan B.

Jan B.

More About Jan

Jan’s many hats:

Jan has been part of Rush Creek Growers for more than twenty years. She is our trucking/shipping coordinator, organizing how the staff pulls orders and does the shipping paper work, so that the office can accurately invoice customers. She loads trucks and does deliveries. Jan  operates the transplanting machine, enters the transplanting data into our inventory program and keeps the transplanting line moving along. She is part of the team keeping track of hard goods and organizing the warehouse. She is also a dog wrangler, pallet pusher, construction worker and Mathematician.

The 2027 staff musings prompt is to write about a plant we believe is a underrated or unsung hero.

Jan’s favorite under-appreciated plant.

 

Let me begin by acknowledging that I really love foliage plants. If you insist on having bright, showy flowers, then perhaps consider skipping my entry. I wouldn’t go so far as to say flowers are over-rated, but would argue that foliage, grown for itself, is often under-rated. It may be because green is my favorite color, but I can happily stare at the many shades, textures and structures of foliage for hours. When I look upon a beautiful, blooming pot of zinnias, I am drawn to the flowers–and I enjoy them immensely–but I don’t get lost in it the way I do a container with a mix of foliage plants. My eye explores the crazy variety of leaf shapes interacting and contrasting, creating tiny worlds within a 12-inch space. And what could be better in this little horticultural universe of green than Homalocladium platycladum. Commonly known as Ribbon Bush, it earns its name from the smooth, flat, ribbon-like stems that branch off in multiple directions, emerging from the edges and tips of the main branches. It’s crazy, it’s weird, it looks like it came right out of a Dr. Seuss book. Describing it as a ribbon, though, does it an injustice. All of those funky stems are also segmented, adding a nifty structural element and earning it another of its common names, the tapeworm plant. Please don’t tell me that you refrain from ordering this versatile, fast-growing, potential houseplant that plays so well with others in any mixed container because you have an aversion to tapeworms. Embrace the parasite! Or, if you’d rather, market this fun, easy-growing darling as a centipede plant. But definitely give it some love.