Page 220 - MM July2018

When the owner is a horticulturalist, landscape designer,
garden writer and craftsman/inventor, it comes as no surprise
that Charlie Thigpen’s Garden gallery is no ordinary garden center.
In 2009, Charlie and Cindy Thigpen brought a combined
49 years of gardening/marketing experience at Southern Progress Corporation (Southern Living) to a new adventure— retail. “We consulted with the Small Business Administration
to help us write a business plan, but when they asked us if we’d looked at other garden centers, we said that we wanted to do something different,” says Charlie Thigpen.
Offering an eclectic mix in the right retail space
His gallery is a creative mix of plants, pottery, garden features, art, crafts and unique gifts in the heart of downtown Birmingham. Located in the mixed use development of an historic factory,
it inhabits indoor space and a courtyard shared with a popular restaurant. “We were looking for a suburban location, but someone suggested we visit Pepper Place. We saw thousands of \[farmers market\] shoppers on a sunny Saturday and hundreds with umbrellas on a rainy one,” says Thigpen. That audience helped reshape what they would sell. “People don’t come to market to buy a tree. They’re looking for grab and go pots of plants, flowers, herbs and one-of-a-kind finds.”
THE GARDENS®
“People have come to
expect something different here. Often they say the”y just come in for inspiration.
CHARLIE THIGPEN
Garden-themed gifts and art come from local artisans, from savvy shopping at AmericasMart in the Temporaries (especially the Made in America section) and the Gardens; from buying trips to favorite manufacturers, often with their interior designer customers in mind, and from the mind of Charlie Thigpen. He excels at refashioning broken and old things into beautiful and useful ones. A pair of hundred-year old sawhorses and vintage lumber becomes a table; a set of old weighing scales gets cups for small candles to become a ‘candlelier'; a worn cast iron plant stand gets topped with a round slap of marble attached by decorative copper wire—and you have a Thigpen original. >
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