The Legacy of Krider Nurseries: From World’s Fair to Middlebury’s Beloved Garden Park
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
March 24, 1993
Dearest reader,
On this day, the town of Middlebury, Indiana, gained not just a garden, but a living testament to the industrious spirit of vernacular horticulture with the donation of 2.4 acres now known as the Krider Display Garden.
Two years hence, this homage to floral ambition blossomed fully into the Krider Nurseries World’s Fair Garden, where history and horticulture pirouette between tulips and toadstools.
It all began with a humble schoolteacher named Vernon Krider, who supplemented his teaching salary by planting berries on thirty modest acres. Ten years later, Vernon traded the classroom for dirt and dreams, launching a nursery unlike any other.
By the roaring ’30s, his empire sprawled over more than 500 acres, just in time to enchant the throngs at Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition.
At the fair, Vernon’s nursery conjured a veritable garden tour of the world—Japanese serenity here, Dutch whimsy with a windmill there—drawing crowds like bees to a bloom. Visitors eagerly exchanged their names for Krider’s catalogs, swelling his mailing list to a staggering 370,000. Truly, the old refrain, “the money is in the list,” proved as fertile as the richest compost heap.
The success was enough to make Middlebury’s tiny post office do somersaults, and soon Krider Nurseries became the town’s largest employer—a veritable gardener’s kingdom.
Not one to rest on laurels, Vernon made headlines again in 1946 by splurging $11,000 on a patent for the thornless ‘Festival’ rose, a bold gamble to tame roses without prickles, and quite literally a stake in the ground.
Adding a final flourish to its famed pedigree, Krider supplied every rose at Tricia Nixon’s wedding—because what’s a political alliance without a bouquet to match?
Yet, as with many a garden, the seasons turned, and by the 1980s, Krider’s fortunes waned. The nursery closed its gates in 1990, nearly a century after Vernon’s first berries took root.
Still, from those roots burgeoning anew, the community lovingly restored the garden in 1995, preserving the whimsy of the original Dutch windmill, the giant toadstools beloved of children, and adding the living quilt of the ever-changing Quilt Garden.
The Krider Garden reminds us that gardens, much like life, are a blend of hard work, beauty, and occasional folly—and when tended patiently, bloom into legacies worth celebrating.
