Featured Professionals

Jeffrey Meulenbroek
Studley Flower Gardens, Inc.
Rochester, NH

Jeffrey Meulenbroek is co-owner of Studley Flower Gardens, Inc. in Rochester, NH, along with his brother David Muelenbrook. Studley's is family business, primarily a retail florist, located in Rochester since 1928. They have been voted Best of the Best for the past 15 years and are currently an FTD top 250 Member.

Complementing the florist business, Studley's also provides full service landscaping and irrigation services and has a retail garden center. Jeff is the greenhouse grower and garden center manager, and also wears a variety of other hats, depending on the season. Jeff grew up in the business, filling water tubes and folded rose boxes for the florist while watching Saturday morning cartoons. He watered in the garden center in the summer, learning his plants and where they were by reading tags while holding the end of a hose. June meant planting annuals. Jeff crawled around on his hands and knees with a trowel in his hand, planting six-pack annuals where his father, Pieter, had placed them. He learned how to placed plants based on color as well as the plant's cultural requirements. "Plant them deeper." "That's too deep!" "You forgot those there." "Don't sit on your behind! Bend over or work on your knees. Sitting around doesn't look good to the customer." His father's words of advice still stick with him.

Jeff graduated from UNH with a degree in US History and embarked on some world travel immediately after. Between trips, he always returned to work at Studley's, learning more and more and delving deeper into different aspects of the business each time he was back: advertising and marketing, landscape billing, garden center, and floral design. Returning to Studley's in earnest in 2000, he concentrated on the greenhouse and paid attention to growing crops as well as display and retail sales. He has greatly expanded the annual and perennial offerings. He's intrigued by weird annuals and things that grow fast, and learned his plants well, devouring catalogs from wholesalers. Latin names came quite easily … he can learn a new plant's Latin name faster than a new customer's! Jeff got his pesticide applicator's license in 2005 and also developed an interest in Junipers and other woodies.

Jeff says, "the greatest part of working retail is learning about my customers and why they garden. You truly see all types, from collectors and plant nuts who visit you weekly to weekend warriors who tackle a section of their yard, to people seeking an insurance estimate because the plow guy took out part of their landscape. I love customers who bring in photos of their house or gardens and seek my advice. That's what forced me to consider the landscape as a whole and its relation to an individual's home and their use of personal space. My challenge is to make the proper recommendations for their needs while profitably selling what's available in the garden center."

In 2007 Jeff became a New Hampshire Certified Landscape Professional (NHCLP) and says, "Initially I thought being a NHCLP wasn't necessary for me since it didn't relate to my primary role at Studley's of greenhouse and garden center manager. However, I welcome a good challenge and wanted to learn more about landscaping. It is important to think intellectually about something you've been doing since you were a kid and to understand why things are done a certain way."

Jeff says that garden center retailing and landscaping are ever linked and becoming NHCLP has allowed him to better understand his customers' needs and provide them with better service.

For more about Studley's: www.studleyflowergardens.com