Family-owner Pleasant Valley Garden Center closes up shop

IOWA CITY - For a family whose members have spent their entire careers in a garden center, it finally was time for them to stop and smell the roses.

Three generations have worked or grew up in the Pleasant Valley Garden Center since it first opened on South Gilbert Street in 1962. Owner Aleda Feuerbach said she planned the shop's last regular day to be Saturday, with hours by appointment for the next two weeks.

The family made the 'gut-wrenching” decision to close the shop in after they had seen the city of Iowa City's plans for revamping the Riverfront Crossings District and suspected there may be efforts to widen the street, Feuerbach said. The garden center, along with Alexander Lumber, is planned to be torn down to make room for a large workforce housing project.

The closing of the shop, however, doesn't spell the end for the name Pleasant Valley, though. Feuerbach said she and her husband, Kerry, will continue to own Pleasant Valley Golf Course while the shop's head grower and manager, Dawn Bouslog, will use the Pleasant Valley name for her new greenhouses in South English, Iowa.

'It just seemed like the timing was such that we were going to say ‘enough.' And it had helped that Dawn said she would continue the greenhouse,” Feuerbach said.

'That made it much easier because that continues the name. That continues where we started. That continues the storyline.”

The new greenhouses, set up on her husband's family farm, at 29030 150th St. in South English, will sell perennials and annuals. Bouslog said she hopes to have foot traffic in the new location around April.

Bouslog wants to continue the long family tradition of Pleasant Valley by having her own little 'dirt spillers” - her two children, ages two and five months - around the greenhouses, just as Feuerbachs had their three daughters.

'I just want to do it justice,” Bouslog said. 'I just want it to be a genuine place to go.”

Pleasant Valley began first as an apple orchard just south of Iowa City by Aleda Feuerbach's father, Arie Kroeze. He first immigrated from postwar Netherlands in 1951 with only $200 dollars and knowing five words of English, said Jessie Feuerbach, Aleda and Kerry's eldest daughter.

'He and grandma are the epitome of the American dream,” Jessie said. 'I just think this family business of ours has such a rich history.”

Kroeze eventually sold the orchard to his brother and moved his business to the current South Gilbert Street location in 1962. Since then, it had expanded to include a flower shop. Kerry Feuerbach took a florist program at Kirkwood Community College to start.

Aleda Feuerbach had taken over the center in the 1980s after a career in broadcast journalism. It was after that when Jessie Feuerbach and her two younger sisters began working in the shop. She remembered as a child going from church to softball games and then to the flower shop - all in her softball uniform.

'We absolutely grew up there,” Jessie said. 'Yeah, we could go have a sleepover, but Mom was going to pick up us at 7 or 8 a.m. because we had to work.”

Jessie said it was her grandfather, and growing up with responsibilities in the center, that inspired her to go into horticulture. While she didn't take over the family business, she currently works to sell products to shops just like her parents'.

The family looked into relocating the center to the golf course, even paying for architectural renderings to be drawn. But that proved to be too expensive to rezone and get approved.

The Pleasant Valley business is coming full circle, though, as Aleda Feuerbach said she plans to buy plants from Bouslog to improve the landscaping around the golf course.

'It's been a good life, but all good things end, right?” she said. 'It's not the end. It's the beginning of something different, and I really truly see us having the time to, as my dad would say, smell the roses.”

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