Natorp's.

It started with a small ad in a florist's window. In 1916 William A. Natorp, a young horticulturist just arrived from Germany, put up a card offering to design gardens for Cincinnati homeowners. People called. He got good, then he got particular: he couldn't find plants locally that were as good as the gardens he was drawing, so he started growing his own. That is how a landscape designer ends up with a nursery, and how a nursery ends up with a designer's eye.

More than a century later it is still the Natorp family. Ken Natorp chairs the company. His sons run it: Kyle as president and CEO, and Craig at the head of the landscape design firm, after a childhood spent trailing his father through the rows and a career working every job on the place. They call it four generations. Cincinnati calls it its oldest and largest nursery.

The nursery sits on 333 acres in Mason, just north of the city, and grows more than a million plants a year: perennials, shrubs, grasses, roses, trees and edibles. New varieties go into the ground next to the old reliables and get watched through real Ohio weather (wet springs, hot summers, honest winters) before anything earns a spot on the list. The plants that sulk don't stay.

They have a habit of rethinking the obvious. In the 1990s they opened the wholesale nursery to the public for one fall week, and that week outsold a full year at one of their garden centers. So they closed the garden centers and built the outlet instead. Kyle has a line we like: "We're about selling plants for the landscape or garden." No knickknacks, no candles. Plants.

Along the way they've picked up gold and silver medals from the Cincinnati Horticultural Society, a Royal Horticultural Society Silver-Gilt Flora medal at the Cincinnati Flower Show, and a Better Business Bureau Torch Award for ethics.

That's the bench our hostas, coneflowers, hydrangeas and Natorp garden kits come from. Look for their name on the tag. We're proud to stand next to it.