What began as a weekly gardening segment on KATVTV, Channel 7’s “Daybreak” has grown into a Little Rock-based multimedia operation working tirelessly to promote one man, P. Allen Smith.
With such fertile ground — Smith’s gardening expertise, soap-star looks and heartland charisma — it’s little wonder that the morning show guest spots have taken root, branching off into the worlds of television, publishing and the Internet.
And on Sept. 30, Smith’s new, half-hour syndicated program, “From the Garden,” will broadcast to 70 percent of households on commercial network affiliates. The show is an expansion of the 90-second segments that appear on local newscasts to 40 percent of households. In central Arkansas, the program will air at 6:30 a.m. Saturdays on KATV.
The company behind P. Allen Smith Gardens, however, isn’t the multimedia conglomerate one might expect. Hortus Ltd. is led by Gaston Gibson, a businessman who spent most of his life about as far away for the television world as one can imagine.
Having co-founded P. Allen Smith Gardens with his late wife, Gloria, and Smith, Gaston Gibson has turned his interests to television production. In the roughly eight years since P. Allen Smith Gardens was conceived, Hortus has purchased thousands of dollars in production equipment, hired a crew and put Smith in 70 percent of TV markets in the U.S.
P. Allen Smith Gardens how has 15 employees and an office in Washington, D.C. overseeing book publishing, publicity and scheduling. The company taps into a $63 billion a year gardening industry.
“We just went through some basic business steps in the beginning that anyone would go through in attempting to start any type of business,” Gibson said.
By doing so, Hortus sprouted its own media mini-empire.
A New Career
For 20 years, Gibson served as president of a pipeline construction company, Worth James, which worked for cities and private companies in Arkansas and beyond. He also built and operated a sanitary landfill — sold in 1992 to Browning Ferris Industries — and has been involved in rice, soybean and cattle operations.
Gibson met Smith while still in the pipeline construction business. Gibson’s wife had hired Smith to remodel her garden. She and Smith became friends, and in 1992, the Gibsons traveled to the United Kingdom for an tour of English gardens, which Smith led.
On that tour, the first of many the Gibsons took, Smith and Gaston Gibson planted the seeds of Hortus and P. Allen Smith Gardens.
“It was walking through these gardens, seeing how they’re put together, seeing how they’re cared for generation after generation, [that there] was a great backdrop for talking about a future business,” Smith said.
Gibson suspected that Smith — a 1983 Hendrix College graduate who had studied garden history and design at the University of Manchester in England — knew his stuff. After returning to Arkansas in the mid-1980s, Smith, a Certified Fellow in the Royal Horticultural Society, ran a nursery and garden design business. Those connections led to his first appearances on KATV, where he would bring in plants from the nursery and dispense timely gardening tips.
So the Gibsons and Smith formed Hortus and its subsidiary, P. Allen Smith Gardens, in 1993. That same year, the company hired the Arkansas Educational Television Network to produce 24 two-and-a-half minute garden segments featuring Allen. The segments began running on KATV’s 5 p.m. newscasts in 1994.
Response to the segments was overwhelming, Gibson said. Hortus put together its own production department — purchased equipment, hired a crew and began shooting more segments. Meanwhile, Gibson traveled the country, talking to news directors to get advice on the segments.
“I personally traveled to 47 news stations across the United States and talked to the general managers and news directors and program directors to get a feel of what this industry was about …,” he said. “I just needed to learn about what made their heart beat, and I did that.”
Dale Nicholson, general manager of Albritton Communications Corp.’s KATV, watched the Gibsons launch Hortus and said the project “didn’t sound like much of an idea” to him at first, given the difficulty of starting a syndicated, coast-to-coast news product. But the Gibsons were determined, he said.
“I think Gaston’s just got a warm and charming personality, and so did P. Allen,” Nicholson said. “And [Gloria Gaston] was so impressed with the work that [Smith] had done for them. [Gaston Gibson] saw some possibility there.”
By 1995, Gibson had assembled focus groups and advisory boards to examine and comment on all facets of the segments. Despite courting from syndicators, Gibson stuck to his plan.
“There’s a real sense in this industry that you need to go out there and develop a program or personality in a hurry and be an overnight success and everything comes up roses,” Gibson said. “But we didn’t believe that. We felt like we were not in New York, and we were not in L.A.”
Using a sample of TV stations, Gibson wanted to see whether the program could sustain itself and station support. By 1996, the gardening segments were on newscasts in 40 to 60 markets throughout the country.
“We thought the toughest viewer, the most critical and the meanest viewer and most unforgiving viewer was the news viewer,” Gibson said. “If we could sustain popularity and interest in local news than we were on to something.”
The newscasts also tested Smith’s expertise. By appearing on the news, Gibson said, Smith was presented as a gardening expert.
“If we weren’t the expert, some local Ph.D…. would see Allen making a tremendous number of mistakes and call the station and say, ‘Get that guy off the air, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’
“I had to know that, because I certainly didn’t know if he was telling all the right answers or not,” Gibson said.
The Ph.D. never called, and Smith is now seen in eight of the nation’s top 10 markets.
Process, Not Product
Hortus and P. Allen Smith Gardens haven’t looked back. In 1999, Hortus hired Litton Syndications Inc. of Charleston, S.C.., to distribute the 90-second news inserts and the half-hour show.
In March, the Weather Channel named Smith its expert gardener. As such, his 90-second gardening inserts appear on the cable network eight times a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He’s also producing several one-hour specials for the Weather Channel. The first, “Drought and Your Garden,” aired this summer.
Hortus also operates an extensive, in-house Web site, pallensmith.com. The company is also considering five-yearbook deal proposals from Harper-Collins, Random House and Crown Publishing.
But Smith said behind all the business, the company is about spreading the message of gardening as a lifestyle, and helping people see parallels between care and growth of living things and the care and growth of their own lives.
And don’t expect Smith to tell his audience they can have a garden overnight. Rather than the end result, Smith said he focuses on the process of gardening.
“That’s where the joy lies,” he said, “and that’s what I want people to recognize.”
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