🔒Plant guys Truglio and Pianta find money grows on leaves

In 1982, 23-year-old David Truglio knew he wanted to own his own business, and observed that architects and designers of malls, airports and atriums seemed to include lots of indoor plants.

So the Connecticut resident, who had just graduated from Boston University with a business-management degree, flew to Florida, and drove back with a U-Haul truck full of potted plants he purchased at a few nurseries and planned to sell them as part of a new business venture called EverGrow.

It was a modest start, as he set up shop as a street vendor in downtown Hartford.

Fast forward about four decades, and Truglio and his now business partner Chris Pianta are putting the finishing touches on a massive project at the Hard Rock Casino in Florida that includes the largest green wall — or plant wall — in the U.S.

“I stuck with it, learned as I went,” Truglio said.

Today, Truglio, 61, owns Green Designs in Berlin and Pianta, 59, owns Colchester-based Agrosci. Since 2016, the two plantscape companies have partnered up on projects to offer their complimentary services. Agrosci specializes in building and installing plant walls, while Green Designs offers custom indoor and outdoor plantscaping.

The partnership has enabled them to capitalize on the growing popularity over the past decade of including plants in architectural design.

Indoor plants aren’t a necessary commodity, and the economy is embroiled in a historic struggle from the fallout of COVID-19. But Pianta and Truglio say their two-year project backlog and customers’ increasing tendency to buy more plants as they get around to home-improvement projects while stuck at home, will lead to strong demand for plant use in building design.

“I believe that the trend toward utilizing plants in public spaces is a trend that’s going to last, because people acclimated to it now are going to expect to see it for a while,” Pianta said.

Planting seeds

Pianta got his start in the horticulture industry at about the same time as Truglio. After graduating from the University of Connecticut with a bachelor’s degree in horticulture and biological science, he began working at a now-defunct regional plant nursery chain called Flower Time. He spent the next 26 years working jobs in different areas of the horticulture industry outside Connecticut — from handling marketing for a Detroit plant nursery company, to blending soil for golf courses in Chicago.

He returned to Connecticut a little more than a decade ago, and in 2012 formed AgroSci.

In 2016, Pianta and Truglio, who ran in the same circles, teamed up on a few projects, including the installation of four plant walls and exterior plantscaping at Bear’s Smokehouse’s New Haven location

The partnership enabled them to be a one-stop shop for design, installation and maintenance.

“We found … clients were looking for more of a full-service opportunity,” Pianta said. “On the Agrosci end of it, we lacked a comprehensive program in service and also plantscape design and installation.”

In their first year, the companies took on about five projects, using up to 400 plants each, Pianta said. Today their pipeline is filled with 40 projects over the next two years. They usually do two major projects annually for which they use about 23,000 plants each.

The duo credit one of their early major projects, the 1 Hotel Central Park in Manhattan, for grabbing the attention of designers and architects wanting to enlist their services.

A three-story tall exterior beam at the corner of the hotel property is covered with English ivy, and windows are surrounded by green leaves, creating a sort of urban architecture meets leafy forest meld.

“It’s kind of known now as ‘the ivy building,’ and not necessarily as 1 Hotel,” Truglio said, adding that clients often point to that property when he asks what they’re looking for.

Other high-profile projects include the 1,000-plant design at Mohegan Sun — they change the flowers based on the season — and the Hard Rock Casino in Florida, a nearly 25,000-plant design.

So far, the pandemic hasn’t affected business much, the partners said. They received funds through the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program to protect the jobs of their dozen employees in case customers started pulling out of projects, Pianta said. But that hasn’t happened. (The partners declined to disclose their annual revenues.)

And judging by the tendency toward environmentalism among Millennials and Generation Z, along with a solid decade of architects and designers incorporating plants in apartment buildings, office suites and other spaces, the partners say they see nothing but growth on the horizon.

“It just has this effect psychologically,” Truglio said of designs that include plants. “They give people more of an experience in a location rather than feeling like they’re just passing through a space.”