Opening for the season on Mother’s Day weekend this year, CountrySide Gardens customers will be greeted by new owners and husband and wife team Chloe and Andrew Near.
The 2025 season, which officially starts May 9, is one that Chloe said her and Andrew are eager to begin and get going. The couple, who relocated and made the move up north to Leelanau to purchase the property and business, have both loved the area since they first started visiting. Chloe said growing up, her parents used to own a condo at Sugar Loaf and they would come up to spend time as often as they could. For the last 15 years though, Chloe said her parents have been in the Northport area, so they’ve made a point to visit them there as well.
At the end of the 2024 season, the previous CountrySide owners’ Sheila and Ozzy Osburn, who operated the Cedar area garden center for nearly four decades, handed over the reins to Chloe and Andrew.
“We’re excited to just be able to finally live up here,” Chloe said. “So we’re just excited to be able to be outside and interact with the community and be with the plants, really. We’re going to continue the way she (Sheila) did it, but we’re hoping that we’ll also maybe add some new offerings as we progress.”
People may have noticed the couple working at CountrySide in the 2024 season, where both Chloe and Andrew trained with the team and assisted with customer service. At the time, Chloe was pregnant, so while they weren’t able to work as many days as they wanted, they still took away and learned so much from the initial experience.
The couple jumped right into the garden center business. While they both have a love for being outdoors and caring for flowers and plants, operating CountrySide Gardens is a new beginning and fresh start from the kind of jobs they previously worked in.
“It was definitely an opportunity, we knew we wanted to move up to the area for a while,” she said. “We kind of weren’t sure what we were going to do for work, so we had been looking at jobs and houses and decided if the right thing comes up, we’ll go with that. Then this opportunity presented itself, and my husband actually has more of a green thumb than I do… But we’ll be growing together.”
The business offers a wide selection of plants including everything from annuals, herbs, and even some perennials, as well as hanging baskets, potted plants, soil, fertilizer and more.
And while Chloe said they will continue the legacy of the business, providing supplies, plants, and flowers to satisfy the gardening needs of Leelanau County and surrounding areas, they also hope to expand not only their digital presence, but their products in the years to come. During Sheila’s ownership over the decades, CountrySide was not online and people found out about the business via word of mouth.
“We hope to expand the offerings, it’s mostly annuals, and this year, we’re going to maybe have some perennials, but we hope in the future to have more perennials,” she said. “And we hope to expand into the off-season, like maybe more fall products, so other kinds of fall and possible winter offerings. We’re going more high-tech, too, so we actually made a Facebook page and a website… It was all word of mouth business before, which is obviously the best kind of business you can get anyway.”
Beginning Mother’s Day weekend, CountrySide Gardens, located at 3582 S. Good Harbor Trail in Cedar, will be operating seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. until Independence Day. After Independence Day, hours will be 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will continue seven days a week until product is sold out. Updates will be posted on the business website
www.countrysidegardenscedar.com and Facebook page.
A variety of hanging baskets and potted plants are among the many products available at CountrySide Gardens in Cedar. Courtesy photo
