Miracle-Gro Creator Passes On

Miracle-Gro creator Horace Hagedorn was an entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Horace Hegedorn, the New York entrepreneur who developed the familiar blue-green concoction of nitrogen, phosphorus and phosphate crystals, has died. He was 89.

Hagedorn, who also became a major philanthropist, died Monday at his home in Sands Point on New York's Long Island of undisclosed causes.

In 1995, Hagedorn merged his Miracle-Gro company with the six-times-larger Scotts Co. - a major lawn and garden product manufacturer based in Marysville, Ohio - gaining three board seats and 42 percent of company stock. He became a vice president of Scotts' board of directors and by 2001 had installed his son, James, as chief executive.

"Horace was a creative genius, and the success of this business, as well as the lawn and garden industry, is due to his energy, drive and insight," James Hagedorn said after his father's death.

With company management assured, the elder Hagedorn turned his attention to philanthropy. At the time of the merger, he and his wife Amy donated $45 million to the Long Island Community Foundation, which aids families and children's programs.

The Hagedorn philanthropy has included medical research and treatment, libraries, scholarships, arts programs and social services. In 2002, Hagedorn guided Scotts to contribute $1 million for a new National Garden on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.

Neither a gardener nor a chemist, Hagedorn seemed an unlikely godfather to Miracle-Gro. A native New Yorker, he began his career in radio advertising during the Depression.

Hagedorn happened into his true calling in 1950 when an upstate New York gardener named Otto Stern asked him to design a newspaper advertisement for his mail-order plant business. Stern also sold a fertilizer to revive plants depleted by long shipping times.

Well aware that suburban gardens were a newfound postwar hobby, Hagedorn suggested that the two men develop their own fertilizer.

Stern and Hagedorn each invested $2,000 and asked a Rutgers University orchid expert to devise a soluble fertilizer for general garden use. Hagedorn said the natural moniker for the resulting nitrogen-phosphorus-phosphate crystals should be Miracle-Gro.

Outsourcing provided a lean, mean profit-making machine, and advertising helped expand sales beyond New York state across the country, to the United Kingdom and beyond.

When Miracle-Gro joined Scotts in 1995, James Hagedorn told Forbes magazine in 1998, Miracle-Gro "consisted of 30 people in a $120-million business making $35 million a year and pretty much hiring everything out except the advertising and counting the money."

--Source: Los Angeles Times.