By: Deborah Johnson Wood
Sunshine, or lack of it, can make or break any landscape plan: If a shade-loving plant gets too much sun, it dies. If a sun-loving plant gets too much shade, it dies. And unless gardeners are willing to stand in the yard for eight hours and monitor the sunlight on a given spot, they pretty much have to guess how much sun it gets. Until now.
Two creative East Grand Rapids women, Kerry VerMeulen and Cynthia VanRenterghem, created SunStick, a sunlight-measuring “flower” that gardeners simply stick in the ground. When they come back at the end of the day, the flower center has changed color. They compare the color to an accompanying color chart and they know instantly how much sunlight that patch of garden receives.
VerMeulen, a former environmental scientist, came up with the idea.
“I had moved my perennials and they weren’t doing well,” she says. “I knew it was a sun issue and I was frustrated. I thought there has to be something I can stick in the ground to tell me how much sun I have, and it can’t be that hard to create.”
The women worked with an Ohio scientist for six months developing a prototype that worked and was appealing.
A second product, SunStick Home, measures the amount of light houseplants get during the day. The products are available online, through garden catalogs and garden centers, and will be available soon at Meijer stores.
“In the south, people are overexposing their plants,” VanRenterghem says. “In the northern half of the country a gardener is always hoping that rose bush will bloom even if it’s in partial shade. Now they’ll know the best place to put their plants so they’ll grow.”
Source: Cynthia VanRenterghem and Kerry VerMeulen, Plumstone; Suzette Garvey, Simply Genuine Communications
Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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