A begonia with dark foliage like a black cat. A spider plant with a pumpkin orange stem. A monstera whose name recalls Frankenstein’s creature and his ilk.
Well-known horticulturist Mélanie Grégoire has just launched her own brand of products called Avec Mélanie. For Halloween, it is offering a collection of “scary plants”, whose characteristics are reminiscent of terrifying characters.
“I like to tell stories,” emphasizes the columnist for the show Salut Bonjour, who had fun associating plants with witches, ghosts and other monsters.
“The brand Avec Mélanie is me, from start to finish. With my colors, my ideas, my playful spirit,” indicates, in a telephone interview, the woman who is also general director of the company Serres St-Élie, in Sherbrooke.
Other products she has developed that will soon be on sale include catnip. “It’s not catnip that drives cats crazy,” she explains, a laugh in her voice. This is the grass they will eat. […] This is definitely something that the vast majority of cats will love. »
Like all of the brand’s plants and flowers, this herb is grown in the eco-responsible Serres St-Élie production complex.
Even though winter still seems far away, Mélanie Grégoire is already thinking about Christmas. For the holidays, she created a gift set featuring aeonium, a plant that looks like a star. This will be accompanied by ornaments to sow to decorate the Christmas tree.
And for gardeners who dream of spring and their next vegetable garden, Mélanie Grégoire will soon offer them “guaranteed success” seed boxes, developed in collaboration with the company Terre Promise. “These are seeds from Quebec, ancestral, grown in an ecological way,” she explains. These are plants that, in my opinion, you can’t go wrong with. »
With the launch of her brand, the horticulturist is bringing to fruition a project that she has long hesitated to get started.
If she found the courage to embark on the adventure, it was thanks to the Plant Baby Month campaign that she set up after the premature birth of her son Laurent. Every March for the past three years, this fundraiser aims to support neonatology research and care.
Thanks to this campaign, Mélanie Grégoire has traveled to the four corners of Quebec in recent years. “I have received so much amazing feedback from people who follow me, who want my advice, who want to have products, who trust me. These meetings gave me the kind of little push I was missing to have the courage to launch my brand. »
