A NURSERY LIKE NO OTHER, Weird Dude's Plant Zoo, L.L.C. resides on five acres in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, one mile west of the Staunton city limits just off of State Route 254. The owners, Marty Harper and Debbie Gartzke, their faithful companions Brown, Orange Man, and Squad Car, and assorted other critters, live on the nursery property in a 120 year old house which they are restoring. Marty and Debbie are surrounding the house and nursery more and more each year with display gardens in full sun to deep shade. These gardens provide opportunities for visitors to the nursery to experience in the garden the plants which Weird Dude's Plant Zoo offers and for the nursery to test plants before offering them. Virginia's Shenandoah Valley provides some of the most rigorous growing conditions under which any gardener could ever want to test himself or his plants, from blazing heat and sticky humidity in July to bitter cold and too much rain in January, all bestowed upon the landscape in a randomness only a statistician could love. Perhaps that's why our plants perform so well - they are so relieved to leave the Shenandoah Valley!

MARTY HARPER, aka Weird Dude, co-owner, greenhouse manager, head grower, gardener, electrician, plumber, carpenter, and janitorial assistant, spends his free time going insane about what he's going to do the next day. When Marty is not tending to greenhouse tasks, he is reading in the over 450 books in the nursery library. Marty acquired his first plant at age nine, a Lemaireocereus marginatus, Organ Pipe Cactus, while visiting relatives in California. He has been hooked on plants ever since.

After graduating from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, with a degree in Geology, Marty worked for the U. S. Forest Service as a geologist, timber marker, mapmaker, and firefighter. Marty then spent time in Florida working for Oglesby Nursery in tissue culture and with other nurseries in the deep South as a grower and salesman. Marty also spent over six years working for nurseries in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia as a perennial plant grower and salesperson. In late 1997, after selling their plants at a local Farmer's Market for three years, Marty and co-owner Debbie Gartzke opened Weird Dude's Plant Zoo.

Marty now grows over 90% of the plants Weird Dude's Plant Zoo sells. Marty has personally grown more than 6,000 species of plants from Zone 1 to 11 and has never found a plant he did not like. (However, he has been rather angry at several hundred.) Marty has gained a reputation for knowing more about more species of plants than anyone around. Now Marty's knowledge is available to customers of Weird Dude's Plant Zoo.

DEBBIE GARTZKE, aka Weird Dudette, head accountant, paperwork organizer, greenhouse plastic patcher, garden mulcher, Farmer's Market and plant show salesperson, Ryder truck driver, Webmaster, photographer, gardener, Weird Dude's main squeeze, and fulltime lawyer in her spare time, has no free time. Debbie has been growing vegetable and perennial gardens for 25 years and is an up-and-coming grower in her own right.

While in law school at Washington and Lee University, Debbie worked in the summer for a wholesale perennial nursery where she met Marty (at which time her life changed forever). She caught the nursery bug and has never found a cure. Consequently, she has no free time. What more can we say? (She has no free time?)

BROWN, aka Weird Dog, head security guard, is a sixteen pound fierce monster who is responsible for guarding five acres of nursery property, both his parents, and the entire Western hemisphere. He takes his job very seriously and does it very well. He has received commendations from the Jack Russell Terrier Security System for his incredible display of totally unnecessary barking. He also has received Honorable Mention in Face Kissing and Licking.

.ORANGE MAN, aka Agent Orange, Orange Crush, Clockwork Orange, The Marching Orange, and Squorange & SQUAD CAR, aka Squad Bod, Velvet Guy, and "There's a cop at the door", aka collectively The Vole Patrol, are buddies, litter mates (we think), and keep their parents sane. We lost our previous Vole Patrol, Midnight and F-Stop, to a gunshot and old age respectively before they ever made it onto this page. In July 2000, Orange Man just showed up and Squad Car followed in October. They have been faithful companions and buddies ever since. And what they can do to a vole...!