ANDOVER — Michael Konjoian has land hands, roughened and earth-dusted.
He was born to the land in 1959, here at Konjoian’s Greenhouses and Landscape Solutions on Chandler Road in Andover.
Right around that time, his parents, Michael Sr. and Vera, started the business on the family farm.
Vera Hagopian was born on the farm in 1929. She and her husband, Michael, were first-generation Americans with family roots in Armenia.
Michael Sr. died in 2016 and Vera in 2018.
Michael Jr. is second generation.
On this particular day, June 8, he and manager Susan Lorenti have just pulled up to a greenhouse at the 5-acre business after installing container plants at homes in Andover and Middleton.
“It started out as a family business 66 years ago,” Konjoian says. “It went from annuals to this.”
He raises his arms and looks around.
In front of him hang rows of full and vibrant baskets. They include impatiens, geraniums and petunias.
Konjoian’s has been known for its hanging baskets since at least the early 1970s.
Around that time, customers also took to cultivating plants on their decks and patios.
Someone who lives in a fourth-story apartment with a balcony might not have a garden space, but he or she can still grow tomatoes, a cypress shrub, or a basket of pink petunias.
Konjoian’s does a thriving business in container plantings.
“This is our time of year,” Lorenti says. “One of the big pieces of our business is custom planters.”
They go to people’s homes and change out their planters for them, putting in new flowers depending on the time of year.
They might be pansies, flowering vincas, Calibrachoa — more commonly known as million bells — or tough and beautiful lantanas, or bidens, a daisy family flower.
On this warm Monday in late spring, they were at houses on Enmore Street in Andover and Bishop Lane in Middleton.
Their summer customer on Enmore was overjoyed to see the plants arrive, including tall grasses.
Meanwhile, Konjoian fiddles with his cellphone and digs out photos of plantings they did a week ago or so right on the ocean in North Hampton, New Hampshire.
There they are near some wild roses and the good old Atlantic Ocean.
They also do plantings for towns, including Andover.
Nearby on the garden center’s grounds are rows of buckets with shrubs, about 50 — azaleas, cypresses and hollies.
They got them at a wholesaler earlier in the day to prepare for an upcoming planting job.
“I like doing color,” Konjoian says.
He graduated from Andover High School in 1977 and then went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and studied horticulture.
Lorenti was originally hired as Konjoian’s Greenhouses’ bookkeeper but now gets her hands dirty on the grounds and in the field.
Nearby is a longtime employee who has been working here since 1984. She greets visitors like family.
“We know that people can go anywhere to get flowers, but they can’t go anywhere to have someone help them choose flowers, containers,” Lorenti says. “People can bring their containers here, and we can help them.”
The garden center also sells mulch and loam. It can be picked up here or delivered.
Konjoian delivered 5 yards to one location and 3 to another on this day.
Lorenti deadheads as she speaks, picking off plants’ dead or dying blooms.
“It’s like doing laundry,” she says.
That way, the plant can direct energy to its living parts.
She points out echinacea, also known as coneflowers. They are bound for the house of a customer who wanted perennial plants in their beds at the front of the property.
“So I’m going to probably drop those off on my way home tonight and lay them out,” Lorenti says. “And the landscaper is going to go put them in tomorrow.”