The late, cold spring was a misery to those of us chafing to get on with our golf games, but for Eliot Wadsworth, it could have spelled disaster. Mr. Wadsworth is the owner of White Flower Farm, a company in northwestern Connecticut that sells high-end ornamental plants and bulbs — “a fantastically complicated business,” he says.

As a former investment banker, Mr. Wadsworth has come to think differently about seed capital, growth spurts, and hybrid investments. He has also learned to deal with new challenges. Like other agricultural businesses, White Flower will sometimes grow a plant for several years and then have just a few days to sell it. When Mother Nature fools around with the seasons, that opportunity can disappear in the course of one frosty night.

Like others before and since, Mr. Wadsworth traded in the stresses of Wall Street for an alluring lifestyle. In the late 1970s, he met William Harris and Jane Grant, two New York writers who had retired to the country with the intention of pursuing their literary careers, only to be seduced by nature. They founded the White Flower Farm in 1950 to provide other avid gardeners with the kinds of hard-to-find plants and bulbs they sought for their own gardens.

Mr. Harris mailed out one of the original plant and flower catalogs, a high-end publication full of helpful information and photographs. Mr. Wadsworth, an enthusiastic gardener, was a customer. They began a conversation that ultimately led Mr. Wadsworth to buy out the business.

The first catalog season was a shocker for Mr. Wadsworth. The farm was sending out 20,000 black and white catalogs, addressed by hand. They had no computerized mailing list — or computers, for that matter. The systems of the business were beyond rudimentary.

“It was a small business,” Mr. Wadsworth says. “It was all about horticulture, not about commerce. It was a mail order company, but they couldn’t take orders over the telephone and didn’t accept credit cards.”

At the time, the farm employed only 12 or 13 full-time employees. It had an extraordinary head gardener from Britain, so Mr. Wadsworth spent his time beefing up the business side. He began to build the off-season activities of the company, such as holiday gifts, in part to provide year-round work to some employees who had previously been laid off during the winter. He also took on product research, traveling the world in search of exotic new plants.

Though he energetically built the business, Mr. Wadsworth was always careful to maintain the pristine reputation of the farm. The image of White Flower was such that when the company first introduced annuals to the catalog, considered lowbrow material by gardening purists, it was written up in the New York Times Magazine.

The company today sells 850 varieties of plants and 350 varieties of bulbs, as well as some 100 types of exotic plants. It now sends out millions of copies of its catalog, which is so beautiful that vintage copies have shown up for sale on eBay. The catalog serves to attract customers to the company’s Web site, which accounts for about 60% of sales

The biggest problem, and biggest opportunity, White Flower Farm faces is that families simply don’t have time to garden anymore, according to Mr. Wadsworth. “Women in their 20s and 30s are working or ferociously parenting or skydiving or something,” he says. “Gardening is a low priority. My mother used to spend six to eight hours every day on her garden. No one has that kind of time today.”

A dwindling gardener population is just one of the challenges the farm deals with today. Like most retailers, it also faces furious competition from big box stores that sell plants below cost, hoping to add on a few trowels or wheelbarrows. According to Mr. Wadsworth, sales have declined for all the gardening catalog companies over the past five years, putting some out of business.

And, like any agricultural business, they also have to deal with the weather. This spring was a nightmare. “When we have a cold, wet spring, a lot of plants are damaged. People wait to see what comes back in their garden. They go to the garden center, and may not find what they are looking for. Then they want what we don’t do best — we can’t deliver a plant in full bloom that can be plopped into the garden to fill a hole. Our plants will take a month to fill in.”

Still, the business has grown terrifically since Mr. Wadsworth first ventured up to Litchfield. These days, some 30,000 people visit the farm each year, and the company continues to add new product. “We’re not that interested in being the biggest,” he says. “Sales are down a little over the past five years, but way up over 20 years ago. And it’s a fabulous way of life for our family.”

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