Bob and Cheri Hooper got the real-deal Montana experience when they moved from Florida to Kalispell in the winter of 1973 to open up their garden center.

“It was a 20 by 40 converted garage with virtually no heat in the middle of January, where the toilet froze solid and you had to sleep in a sleeping bag to keep from freezing your butt off — that's what we started with,” Bob Hooper said.

After 50 years of having their nose to the grindstone, Hooper’s Garden Center is a destination for people all across Montana and neighbor states. Expanding to include 16 greenhouses, five retail houses, garden shop, production area and more — gardeners travel far and wide to buy Hooper’s plants because they are grown with our climate in mind, or “cold growing,” as Bob refers to it.

The couple has been searching for the perfect person to sell the business in order to ensure it goes to someone who wants to keep their hard work alive.

Phil Aitken started shadowing the Hoopers in January of this year. He thought purchasing the business was off the table, but after the previous contract holder couldn’t afford to buy the business in a two year time-frame, Aitken put in an offer.

Much like Bob and Cheri, he’s wanting to make it a family affair, particularly because his wife, Kim, who is from the Montana Hi-Line town of Shelby, is already a fan of the garden center.

“My wife said, ‘well, if you get into this, you have to promise me one thing,’ and I said ‘what's that?’ And she said that ‘you won't ruin Hooper's,’” Aitken laughed. “Because even the people from Shelby love Hooper’s.”

Aitken not only benefits from Bob’s decades of knowledge, he’s surrounded by the staff at the garden center who are planning to stay put. The staff includes 10 to 12 full-time employees, which balloons to up to 47 during the summertime with seasonal workers.

“We have a formula we perfected over 50 years that gives us quality plants and obviously, they don't want to change that, because it's worked for us that long. So the best way to continue that is to continue doing the same thing that we've always done,” Bob said.

Bob is teaching Aitken in the same way he learned to grow plants when he moved here in the 1970s. He learned what he knows from an older farmer who had been growing here since the valley’s early days.

“The old man who taught me how to grow, he said, ‘I want to give you the basics, but you're going to change some things down the road, as technology changes things. And you're going to find you will be doing different things with different plants.’ And I'm sure when he (Aitken) gets down further down the road here, he's going to say, ‘you know, it worked for Bob, but I think we're gonna do something different on this.’ That's the evolution of any business,” Bob said.

There are a few things that make Hooper’s unique when it comes to their process for cold growing plants. Bob said they start plants in their greenhouses at 48 degrees, do not have an automated watering system and strategically know when to move plants outside to “harden” to the colder temperatures. If a plant is put in the ground but is not hardened, particularly during the early planting season in this area of Montana, it will have a very hard chance of survival.

“So, if you turn the temperature up to 75 degrees in those houses, they're gonna dry out. And you could probably put an automated watering system in there, because they're going to dry out every day. But things are going to be long, lanky, soft— they're not going to have the hardness and the quality they need to survive being an outsider, especially in early spring,” Bob said.

He said with cold growing you can’t “go in and hose everything down like it's on fire.” Overwatering in cold temperatures and no sun can lead to rot. Instead, they have a “hunting and pecking” technique where they check and see if the plant is dry and will hand water when necessary.

“A lot of these big greenhouses use boom sprayers, it's got water coming down and they just water the whole bench. (At Hooper’s) you'll see ladies and gentlemen in each and every house hand-watering. We do have a system that will water the baskets, but we manually turn it on,” Cheri said.

Aitken said he was recently given his own greenhouse to manage, where he learned that “it’s an art to water 7,500 geraniums.”

“One of the things that I appreciate now is I understand why it's called a nursery because you're nurturing a lot of those plants. You know, just like you thought of a nursery for kids, what you're doing is you're totally nurturing them. It's not just selling them as soon as they're ready,” Aitken said.

Aitken said he will continue to work and learn under Bob, Cheri and their crew until he has sufficiently learned enough to take over the business. Bob and Cheri said when that time comes, they’ll be enjoying spending more time with grandkids and traveling the country in their camper.

“We could have sold this place countless times. But the right person had to come along, the right person had to fit the parameters that would step into the shoes that we have picked up that family, you're looking at him, right there,” Cheri said.

“It's a family, you're not going to say, ‘God, I gotta go down there and pick up something,’ you know. It's a destination that they want to enjoy and be a part of. And that's what we hope that we've passed on to Phil and his crew, to pick up that gauntlet and go forward.”

Reporter Taylor Inman can be reached at 406-758-4433 or by emailing tinman@dailyinterlake.com