In the spring of 1956,
A. P.
Hollingsworth and wife Mildred
would drive from Arcadia to Lake Placid, Caladium Capital
of Florida, and fill the trunk of the car with Caladium
bulbs to sell to some of the local garden centers.
A year later A.P. developed what
was in fact the first pre-packaged "instant pot
plant". The bulbs were packed in peat moss in
plastic containers. The wick that came out of the bottom
of the pot fed just the right amount of moisture to the
bulbs to ensure development. All that was  required was to add a little water to the saucer every few days. Tom vividly remembers he and his brothers
spending many after school hours inserting the nylon
wicks into the pots. These houseplants were a huge
success at Florida's first "mall", Webb City,
as well as other southwest Florida garden centers.
Caladiums were not A.P. Hollingsworth's only business
though. He and his brother-in-law, Henry Lanier, had bought a patent for
barbecue sauce from a Lakeland
restaurant, "The Smokehouse". In 1958 they began
bottling at a plant that stood at the present location of
Sun Bulb and continued to do so until 1972 when the
bottling plant burned down leaving the bulb warehouse
standing.
These are the beginnings of Sun Bulb.
You're probably wondering
how the orchids came into play ?
A.P. Hollingsworth was a shrewd businessman and his keen
marketing sense led him to the idea of offering
inexpensive top cuts of Vanda Miss Joachim as a premium
to increase sales of barbecue sauce. 25-cents and a
label from an 8-oz. bottle along with a special coupon
would return the exotic orchid to the sender.
This was actually a very natural development,
A.P.'s interest in orchids went back to his childhood.
He writes in his excellent beginner's guide, Growing
Orchids is Fun;
"When I was a boy, one day my father came home from
the Florida Everglades, and on the back seat and floor of
his Model T Ford was an eight-point buck deer, a wild
bearded turkey gobbler, and from a fallen cypress tree, a
strange plant with long sharp horns and hundreds of
magnificent tiger spotted yellow-green flowers, a
Cyrtopodium orchid. The sharp needle pointed horns stuck
my finger and it must have infected my life with an
incurable disease known as Orchid Fever."
The rest is history.
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