WorryFree Plants brand launches exclusively for independent garden centers

Overdevest Nurseries, Prides Corner Farms and Willoway Nurseries, with over 150 years of combined experience, have formed WorryFree Plants to provide a bridge between plant breeders and independent garden centers.

Their goal was to partner together to build an extensive and diverse collection of plants designed to take the guesswork out of gardening for the consumer.

"WorryFree is about empowering the independent garden center with an exclusive, solution-based brand," says Ed Overdevest, president of Overdevest Nurseries. "By removing the guesswork for the consumer, we make the sale effortless for the IGC. We chose to embark on this journey to ensure local retailers have a high-performance brand that big-box stores simply cannot offer."

The WorryFree collection of plants is vetted for:

• Problem-solving genetics: High resistance to deer, pests and disease.
• Environmental responsibility: Sterile, non-invasive varieties that protect local ecosystems.
• Climate resilience: Plants engineered to thrive despite fluctuating water and light conditions.

Backstory of WorryFree Plants

The Syn-RG group trialed and worked with plants from the University of Connecticut.

“They had a sterile barberry line that Dr. Mark Brand had been working on for quite a few years, and they were looking for a partner to bring that to market,” Overdevest says.

The group was intrigued by the opportunity because many states at that point were starting to regulate invasive plant species, and as Overdevest says, “Barberry was one of the poster children of that regulatory moment.”

In response, the Syn-RG group proactively grew sterile barberry plants to offer to the trade as an alternative to those that would eventually be banned. That was the start of the group’s work with UConn and the barberry.

Syn-RG started adding additional plants that addressed the invasive species issue: plants that were either sterile or non-fertile.

As time went on, the WorryFree Plants partners realized invasiveness wasn’t the only issue that gardeners, regulatory agencies and the trade deal with. They recognized that there were additional issues that gardeners were facing, such as deer and pest resistance, disease, invasiveness, climate stress and hardiness.

“We started the WorryFree brand many years ago with the idea of bringing non-invasive plants to the marketplace, and that value proposition was just not enough” says Mark Sellew, president of Prides Corner Farms. “We needed to reimagine it and bring great plants that are truly worry-free.”

What began as barberry breeding evolved into the WorryFree brand, which includes a variety of plants bred to take the worry out of gardening, as Overdevest says, “so gardening for homeowners can be the joy that it’s meant to be.”

The reimagined brand was introduced to the trade at Cultivate’26 and will launch to consumers in the spring of 2027. New packaging and marketing showcase the reimagined concept of WorryFree as a "simply joyful" brand for the consumer.

"By combining our resources and expertise, we are able to provide a level of quality and support that benefits the entire horticultural industry,” says Tom Demaline, president of Willoway Nurseries. "We are working together to offer breeders a reliable path to market and IGCs a resilient product line. We started WorryFree Plants to ensure that 'beautiful' and 'easy' are no longer mutually exclusive, creating a 'Simply Joyful' outcome for the entire industry."

An independent garden center-exclusive brand

WorryFree has been and will remain an IGC-only brand, making them the only place where consumers will be able to find the brand.

“We wanted to grow the brand, and we wanted to make it an IGC-only brand because all the big brands are in the boxes, so we felt that was a competitive advantage for the IGC,” Sellew says. “We were able to find some great new plants, particularly in the perennials, by partnering with best-in-class breeders.”

The WorryFree brand provides breeders with a way of introducing their work and their new genetics to a sector of the market that can best demonstrate the quality and the appeal of the plants to the consumer.

“Perennials are selling well in general; it's a growth category, and we're going to leapfrog that for the IGCs with some amazing deer-resistant, super hardy plants that sell really well,” Sellew says. “We're going to have new exclusive plants that were tested in Zones 3 and 4, so we're happy that there's going to be an extra degree of hardiness.”

The expanded portfolio will cover the full range of hardy landscape plants: woodies, perennials, flowering shrubs, rhododendrons, sterile barberries and grasses.

“We're excited to turn this into a program that we have pioneered and want to create a store within a store at the garden centers,” Sellew says. “You can't do that if you have 20 different plants; we're looking to have 50 to 100 next year.”

Katie McDaniel is associate editor of Garden Center and Nursery Management magazines. Contact her at kmcdaniel@gie.net.