BATON ROUGE — Plant World Nursery & Hardware has been a staple in Baton Rouge for almost 50 years. Gary and Marianne Chapman started the business back in 1977. It’s played a huge role in the community, and the Chapman family ever since.
Now, after nearly five decades in business, the Chapman family has decided to close Plant World’s doors following Gary and Marianne’s tragic deaths in late 2025. The store wouldn’t exist had the couple not met 65 years ago while working together in the retail industry.
“My father was a lifelong retailer. He and my mom met in 1960,” one of the couple’s sons, Gary Chapman Jr. told UWK. “He was an assistant manager for Woolworth. He’s from North Little Rock, Arkansas, but they moved him all around the Southeast. My mother was hired to work at that store when he was like, 17 or 18 years old.”
The Chapmans had been together ever since, setting the foundation for a shared work ethic from their wedding day. “The story we’ve been told our whole life, we don’t know the accuracy of it, but we believe it’s pretty close,” Gary Jr. said. “They knew each other for a very short time, two weeks or three weeks, something like that. Then he got transferred to Memphis to run another Woolworth store up there. After a short amount of time, he called her up on the phone, said, ‘Hey, would you come up to Memphis and marry me?’ So she got on the train, went up there and married him on his lunch hour. She went to his apartment. He went back to work.”
That work ethic carried them through six decades of marriage, careers, and business ownership. The Chapmans moved to different states, worked for different companies, and eventually, Gary Sr. opened his own stores. “He opened a chain of three or four stores called Chapman distributors in South Mississippi, where we lived,” Gary Jr. said. “We had those for a few years, but a fire destroyed one of them. My father lost everything.”
“We ended up moving to Baton Rouge, which is where mom was from, and he opened a nursery on Florida Boulevard at the corner of Oakville and Florida. Before Cortana Mall was there, it was an abandoned Exxon gas station,” Gary Jr. explained. “That was about 1974. Then they announced Cortana Mall was coming.”
After that happened, Plant World was born. “We moved and he bought this piece of property that he’s currently in, on Greenwell Springs Road, and moved the nursery and added hardware there,” Gary Jr. said. “That was about 1977 and he’d been running at that location ever since.”
The story played a big role in the family, serving as a meeting place and even laying the foundation for some future careers. “We all grew up in that store. Every day after school, the school bus would drop us off at the store. We would work till the store closed,” Gary Jr. said. “When we got old enough to drive, we would come to work after school, and every Saturday and Sunday.”
“My brother Steve, the middle brother, became a landscape architect. Jeff and I stayed in the store for a little while. Jeff opened his own landscaping business in Baton Rouge, and I continued to stay at the store and run it. Then I left there and started a landscape business of my own for a couple of years,” Gary Jr. continued. “Mom and dad been running the store ever since, by themselves, very little help.”
Unfortunately, Gary Sr. & Marianne died after a crash on Dec. 18, 2025. Gary Sr. died from his injuries the same day. Marianne died Dec. 26, 2025. All three of their sons said the two would not have survived without each other having lived 65 years together, rarely apart.
The family has decided to close Plant World following the Chapmans’ passing, and are running a half price sale Monday, Jan. 5 through Saturday, Jan. 10. All nursery stock, plants, mulch, soil, etc. are on sale starting at 10 a.m.
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